Colorado’s BookBrewer distributes Huffington Post nonfiction ebook Date:

Colorado’s BookBrewer distributes Huffington Post nonfiction ebook Date: Wednesday, September 7, 2011, 2:51pm MDT

by Greg Avery

The Huffington Post started selling the first nonfiction e-book by one of its writers this week, and the online media company chose local startup BookBrewer as its distributor.

BookBrewer technology pushed "A People’s History of the Great Recession,” by HuffPo’s Arthur Delaney, out to online stores selling ebooks for users of iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Kobo readers.

"How We Won,” by Aaron Belkin, another HuffPo contributor, publishes Sept. 20.

BookBrewer is the brand name of FeedBrewer Corp., which Dan Pacheco, its founder and CEO, recently moved to Boulder.

Handling the nonfiction works of Huffington Post is a coup for BookBrewer, profiled in the DBJ last October.

As that article noted, one of its early victories was being chosen by Borders to be the bookstore chain’s online store technology. By then, though, the giant brick-and-mortar bookstore was already on the ropes, about to be felled by its slowness to get into ebooks.

Border’s filed for bankruptcy protection in February and then failed to reorganize or sell the business, forcing it to begin liquidating stores nationwide in July.

BookBrewer continued to attract self-publishing authors and others to grow its service. Huffington Post’s books are its biggest get yet. (Pacheco's blog about it is here.)

In a blog published Sunday, Arianna Huffington, founder and editor-in-chief of HuffPo and editor of AOL’s content, explained her company’s reasons for branching out into nonfiction ebooks.

Distributing books from HuffPo, an AOL property, is something of a homecoming for Pacheco. He worked at AOL during its heyday as an online pioneer.

That didn’t factor in to HuffPo’s selection of BookBrewer, said Mario Ruiz, HuffPo vice president of communications.

"We chose BookBrewer because it’s easy to use and works well for e-publisher platforms,” Ruiz said, via email. "After we found BookBrewer, we learned that [its] CEO Dan Pacheco had worked at AOL. He was a great resource in getting us familiar with the e-publishing process.”

(Full disclosure, Pacheco and I worked together at the CU-Boulder School of Journalism and Mass Communications’ newspaper, the Campus Press, nearly two decades ago.)