New epublisher alert

The Shatzkin files this week writes about the new publishers. What intrigues me about the new publishers is that they are mostly print publishers turning to ebooks. But why totally abandon print is my question? Although I obviousy love electronic books I most like the combo of print and electronic together. I'm trying to imagine why these companies want to produce exclusively electronic books. And look how many of them are print-content (read "newspaper" or "magazine") companies, something I blogged about a few months ago by following up on a new year prediction from England's The Guardian, see Globalister 1/3/13. So here's the list from Shatzkin: "Most recently, Scientific American launched a series of ebooks. American Express Publishing launched an ebook line with Vook. The Atlantic began to publish its own ebooks. USA Today published USA Tomorrow, a collection of expert predictions about the future of America. Harlequin and Cosmopolitan magazine inked a deal to publish several ebooks a month together. Newsweek/Daily Beast entered into a partnership with Vook to publish ebooks. Playboy launched a series of shorts for the Kindle, the Washington Post announced an e-book program, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, a trade publication focused on the higher education field, launched an e-book business. Other notable companies to jump into the space are magazine publishers Conde Nast and Hearst and NBC News, a division of NBC Universal. And the Wall Street Journal has recently rejuvenated its e-book program. In addition to these, we know of more: the New York Times, the Toronto Star, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, TED Books, Esquire, the Guardian, Wharton Business School, the US Army, Provincetown Public Library, the Saturday Evening Post, Xiamen Bluebird Cartoon Company of China, cartoon-producer Fred Seibert creating Frederator Books, and Scott Rudin and Barry Diller’s Brightline, and many others. Of course, all of these are content-producing entities; many of them are even print-content producers. But it simply wasn’t in their power to decide to become book publishers until the world changed. Three companies which started out with content-generation ideas of their own — Vook, Byliner, and Atavist — are frequent partners for these new publishers, as are existing publishers from Big Six players to Perseus’s Constellation, Ingram, new ebook publishers Open Road, Diversion and Rosetta, and other companies like INscribe and PressBooks. Actually, from my own experience, I would add The Denver Post and the Atlanta Journal Constitution.