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Digital-First Publisher Momentum Books to Drop Digital, Switches POD

If the latest Momentum-Avatar-e1328049705378[1]news from Momentum Books is any indication then April is going to be a month for surprises.

This Pan Macmillan Australia imprint has just announced, in a blog post dated 1 April, that they are giving up on ebooks.  Momentum Books has accepted the fact that the majority of the book market is still paper, and it’s going to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

In a shock announcement sure to make waves in the Australian publishing industry, Momentum, the digital-first imprint of Pan Macmillan Australia, has announced that they will no longer be publishing books digitally. Their entire back catalogue will be converted to print, as will all upcoming books.

Momentum’s publisher Joel Naoum said, “While we’ve had an extremely valuable experience working in digital, we’ve had to make the decision to go to a print-based model. We’ll still be publishing the same kinds of projects, but we’ll be delivering them via an exciting new system.”

Momentum Books is still going to be an experimental imprint for Macmillan, only they’re now going to focus on a delivery method other than ebooks. They’re going to be the first publisher to combine POD and delivery by drone.

The second part of the announcement was that instead of sending print books to bookstores, the books will be delivered to individuals via drone. This follows the death of an extremely wealthy relative of Naoum’s, who bequeathed the publisher an undisclosed sum.

This pivot was inspired in part by Amazon Prime Air, the drone delivery system Amazon debuted late last year, as well as other early drone delivery projects, including one created by an Australian startup.

Momentum sees drones as the future, though of course the  tech still needs to be debugged. For those who want the books without drone delivery, Naoum said “get with the 21st century, man.”

P.S. You might want to check the date on Momentum’s blog post.

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