Unbound’s ambition is to make the existing online crowd-funding model Kickstarter work for book publishing. Kickstarter is a funding platform. It lets a creator sign up and ask for a specific amount of funding for his/her creative project, if this is reached then the project goes ahead. Unbound works almost identically for books, except that it places emphasis on curating the end result. Editorial, design, and distribution processes still take place once the book is written.
This makes for an innovative business enterprise along the lines of process innovation, which improves upon the increasingly popular crowd-funding and self-publishing models. Authors and readers have greater control over what gets published, whilst at the same time through several aspects of traditional publishing there is a greater degree of quality control and a greater likelihood of finding a market.
Unbound can also be considered a product innovation because subscribed readers when they pledge are treated to a “literary package” containing updates, interviews, sample chapters and rewards such as their name in the back of the book and lunch with the author. Readers are arguably being sold a more comprehensive literary experience instead of a single book.
The main flaw in Unbound’s innovative model is that they are not currently in the position to accept unsolicited manuscripts. So far they have predominantly been funding experimental projects by well-known authors that bigger publishers do not see as marketable, such as Kate Mosse’s Chichester Festival Theatre. Unbound do plan to “build a mechanism for unknown authors to make their pitches before moving over to the main site,” (Watters, 2011) and once this is achieved the true innovative potential of the model will be realised.
This video is an interesting introduction to the concept of Unbound: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de9CQA7G6vk
This article is also a useful resource: http://www.fastcompany.com/1769453/unbounds-spine-tingling-effort-to-reinvent-book-publishing
Watters, A. “Unbound Aims to be the Kickstarter for Book Publishing” ReadWriteWeb 30th May 2011. Web. 15th March 2012. < http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/unbound_aims_to_be_the_kickstarter_for_book_publis.php>
A fascinating case of innovation. Perhaps you could imbed you presentation slides in your post, too?
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