You may have read the tale of the Italian CEO who saved cows by bringing cheese to the Bronx but now is the time to tell you a bit more about our arrival in the US. The best person to do so is of course our very own StreetLib USA Boss: Giacomo D’Angelo. On May 3 at about 3pm CET, he took a trip from Ancona, Italy to New York, United States via Munich, Germany that brought him to a whole new adventure with StreetLib. You can read all about StreetLib in the US on the dedicated page here but, in the meantime, read Giacomo telling us about him and his American adventures:
INVESTING IN THE PUBLISHING MARKET
Experts may show us numbers saying the publishing world is in crisis and the eBook dying but for me they are two point of views to have depending on where you are standing. You can look at things from the place of power of large publishing groups, or from the streets of publishing, where people wake up in the morning to go work to improve their piece of the world.
From the upper spheres it’s a drama: Of course large publishing groups holding the power will be against changes that may put in question their power. To this adds up an aggravating factor: we are talking about the “traditional” publishing market, sick in itself, not because of the digital world but because of a problem called “returns”.
The ones making money on publishing aren’t the bookstores or the publishers, but the distributors (often even in conflict of interest with big publishing houses!) handling the (paper) books from the printer to the bookstore, and from bookstores back when the unsold books are brought to the shredder… This leads these big groups to the ridiculous attempt to sell their eBooks at unreasonably high prices to avoid interfering with their probably-not-for-long profitable paper business, and the market reacts consequently, as it should.
From down there, on the other hand, the scenario is thrilling: more than ever authors and small publishers are understanding that digital technologies and network dynamics allow them to start playing seriously their cards in the new publishing market, even with no money to put on the table. People who work with passion, enthusiasm, will, abilities and professionalism. People free to follow their own instincts and don’t need to abide by any political or business power, allowing them to react quickly and even sometimes anticipate both technological and strategic market developments. Those are the ones who are reshaping the publishing landscape worldwide.
We, from our own little place in the world, decided to start from there with StreetLib: from this enthusiasm, trying to support these persons the best we can with our technology. And we are doing so in the whole world: StreetLib is already used by many authors and publishers outside of Italy, and there will be more and more now that we have a way to be better introduced in the United States.
FROM ANCONA TO NEW YORK
The time for the world to know StreetLib has come. At the center of the publishing world, New York looks like the best place to start. StreetLib already offers a panel of services appreciated by thousands of authors and publishers in Europe (but not only), it is time now for us to enter a more competitive and harder, but also more exciting, market such as the American one. We only are at the beginning of investing the publishing world and I feel we are on the right track.
CTO & STREETLIB USA CEO
Today, I have two hats and work both as StreetLib CTO and StreetLib USA CEO. I’m a technician and I got to know the publishing market and its dynamics pretty well thanks to 7 years working with StreetLib. In this time, I have put my hands on pretty much everything and learned all I know in the middle of it. I am an engineer and always play the technical role within StreetLib: the technical aspect of the book, after five centuries, is going through a radical innovative phase, giving us a lot to do!
For us, the novelty is much more to be all together!
At StreetLib we’ve built an exceptional team used to work in a spread manner, i.e. without all being all under one roof, and we’ve worked well like this for years now, both on the tech side and with the others, so being on the other side of the planet isn’t really novelty for us.
All we need is a laptop and an internet connection. In the past 6 months, I have lived in Lisbon, Portugal and Barcelona, Spain. The foundation of all of it being the trust we put in people and in our teams. It’s with this trust that we can work well.
The coming months
Of course StreetLib will continue to grow and offer a service always improving to its users. Today, our technology supports every person loving books and/or working with them: StreetLib Write for those who want to produce them, StreetLib Publish for those who want to distribute them online, StreetLib Print for those who want to print them, StreetLib Sell for those who want to sell them and MyBook.is, our bookstore, where the author can become the retailer and get 75% of the cover price from his sales, much more than what he’d get from Amazon or Apple.
All this goes to show that we are working on many fronts at one time and this is why our strategy is and always will be the same: provide the best service possible to our authors and publishers.
The great Gustiamo team welcoming Giacomo (left)
Just as I can tell you that we will move fast in New York: We’ll open an American subsidiary that’ll work in the legendary Gustiamo.com coworking-warehouse. From there, we’ll be able to serve our american and international clients better than ever while dealing with a market much bigger and more demanding than ours. It’s agreat challenge and we are ready to face it. As I was saying, it’s only the beginning and I’m sure the best is still to come!
Facing America and the weekend, we could add that “con un’aria da commedia americana sta finendo anche questa settimana” (that would translate from Lucio Dalla’s lyrics “this week will also end with the melody of an american comedy”) keeping in mind that, if the great Lucio could still delight us with his notes, we’d let him know that his poetry may be immortal but that America is no longer this far, even if it may be on the other side of the moon. Indeed, America never felt this close: StreetLib USA is born!
