Hungry Minds Lets Customers Mix and Match Chapters

Posted on March 21, 2001

Hungry Minds, publisher of the For Dummies series and Frommer's Travel Guides, announced the launch of Hungry Minds a la Carte, a new epublishing website. With the new service consumers are able to mix and match content from selected titles in either series to create customized ebooks and either download them or order them printed and bound. Users can access the service through dummies.com, frommers.com or hungryminds.com. The announcement was made by Hungry Minds' chairman and CEO John Kilcullen.

Using technology from digital service provider iUniverse.com, Hungry Minds will distribute content in hard-copy format, using print-on-demand technology, as well as electronically as PDF (Portable Document Format), Microsoft Reader and Rocket-eBook. iUniverse.com also provides management of rights and royalties, transaction processing, and reporting functions. In addition to services for publishers, iUniverse.com also provides epublishing services directly to authors.

Consumers can access Hungry Minds a la Carte to gather information from the various Hungry Minds imprints for any number of uses. Searching content by specific tasks as well as title, someone that is being re-located to San Francisco for example, may choose chapters from Frommer's San Francisco and chapters from Home Buying for Dummies. Another user looking to plan summer outings with kids may select the historical sites she's interested in from Frommer's Washington DC With Kids as well as Digital Photography for Dummies so they can document the family vacation.

``This is the first step in Hungry Minds' long term objective of digitizing its entire library for electronic distribution, a step which offers new revenue streams and solution sets for our customers, authors and strategic partners,'' said Kilcullen in making the announcement. ``Hungry Minds a la Carte is directly in line with our mission to make our best-selling `how-to' brands accessible beyond the limitations of bound books by providing consumers with the information they need anytime, anywhere and in a format that they can easily understand.''

Customers will be charged by the chapter, with prices varying according to book size, the title's original price, and format. A minimum price of $15 plus shipping and handling will be charged for printed books and there will be a minimum requirement of three chapters for ebooks. Electronic books will be available within minutes of purchase, while trade paperbacks ship within 48 hours.