OWNI: eBook publisher

Find our first ebook, WikiLeaks: A True Account, on the OWNIshop.

Every day, OWNI selects and covers the best information on society, politics and culture in the digital age, in accordance with our editorial DNA.

Our ambition is to make the best use of Web tools, including data visualization, interactivity, HTML5, the social web, and gathering the best information on the Internet. Contrary to the criticisms from traditional media pundits, we believe the Internet offers journalists, publishers and people working in the media a great opportunity to give new life to our profession. It gives reporters the chance to tune in with their readers, allows editors to directly confront opposing opinions, and makes way for “augmented” information. The web may not be a news paradise, but it does allow us to collectively escape the purgatory which has fossilized our profession.

With OWNIbooks and our Pulp eZines, we aim to push our standards even higher and take on the challenge to share quality information for the benefit of many. According to the dictionary, editing means “preparing for publication” and “curating.” It derives from the Latin word for eating, ‘edere’. It’s providing food for thought.

The selection of dishes will be top notch. For this reason, it wasn’t difficult to select Wikileaks as the subject for our first eBook. OWNI partnered with the whistleblowing organisation during the release of the Iraq Warlogs, giving us an exceptional vantage point.

In a few decades, historians will most likely pinpoint the advent of Wikileaks as crucial to the information revolution, and the downfall of state secrecy. Julian Assange’s organisation re-evaluates key ideas first raised by Enlightenment philosophers during the eighteenth century. Olivier Tesquet’s thorough investigation seeks to shed light on this relationship.

Three innovative collections

Though digital publishing is still in its infancy in France (accounting for barely 1% of print sales, compared to 5% in the UK and 15% in the U.S.), this is partly due to the French cultural exception:

A dense network of independent bookstores fights for survival.
Publishers do not want to let go of their stronghold on the industry, and books in their paper form still holds a special significance in our culture.

To this one must add that eBooks have not met with people’s expectations: often they are too expensive and their format doesn’t meet users’ web savvy standards. We believe the new generation of readers, geeks, and digital natives have a real appetite for longform writing which is participative and deeply connected to the web experience.

We are launching three types of eBooks in three essential languages​: English, French and Arabic.

• OWNIbasics, eBooks devoted to our digital experience. This includes a bit of the technology behind it, but mostly an analysis of the issues it raises for contemporary society.
• OWNIover, eBooks that focus on investigative journalism and featured articles first published on our daily news site. We put a magnifying lens on these stories to suit a different readership base.
• OWNIbeyond, Experimental books that make us of the hottest digital tools on the market: from augmented reality to HTML5, interactive features and geolocation. They’ll be made available in all formats: ePub3, webapps, and apps.

Wikileaks: A True Account is not our first eBook. We experimented with eleven releases last Christmas. But it is the first one to be published in three languages: French, English and Arabic. Publishing in English was an obvious step: Wikileaks and Cablegate have directly affected the entire English speaking world.

We partnered up with Immaterial.fr to release the Arabic editions of our eBooks on all platforms (with the exception of the OWNIshop) which opens its doors today. With the exception of the Quran and other religious books, there is a limited supply of editorial works in Arabic, not to mention eBooks.

A long winter of unfinished revolutions in the Arab world showed us – in case anyone had doubts – that on the other side of the Mediterranean, there’s a thirst for open knowledge, democracy, transparency and understanding the world’s issues. OWNIbooks and our newly-launched Middle East bureau OWNImaghreb wish to cater to this democratic current.