It's been five months since Timothy Ferriss launched his bold experiment in modern publishing. The best-selling author bypassed the "big six" publishers, signed with Amazon and, as if that weren't unconventional enough, partnered with BitTorrent to help promote his new book, The 4-Hour Chef. 

The whole thing seemed almost designed to generate press, which it did. But now for the important part: Did the experiment work?

It sure looks that way. Despite being boycotted by Barnes and Noble and other bricks and mortar retailers, Ferriss's book has sold over 250,000 copies and landed on all the major bestseller lists. 

Of course, Ferriss is a well-known and established author, which helps. So does signing with Amazon, which is powerful enough to send the U.S.'s biggest brick-and-mortar book retailer into a book-banning fury. 

But as mighty as Amazon is, being banned from big-box retailers is a serious handicap. To compensate, Ferriss had to forge some unexpected partnerships, such as with smaller retailers and Panera Bread, the sandwich shop chain. He also teamed up with BitTorrent, through which he published a 680-megabyte bundle of bonus content, including behind-the-scenes videos, a sample chapter and author notes. 

Can BitTorrent Actually Drive Sales? 

"To be honest, I was initially skeptical about how many sales would result from BitTorrent," says Ferriss.  "After all, that's where people go to get stuff for free, right?"

Indeed, most people associate the P2P filesharing protocol with pirating movies, music, software and yes, books. BitTorrent, Inc has been busy trying to shed that reputation, in part by partnering with well-known content creators like Ferriss, even if they're somewhat nervous about the idea. 

"It turns out that I couldn't have been more wrong," he says. "The click-through rates from BitTorrent to Amazon were higher than anything I've ever seen through paid advertising.  Orders of magnitude higher."

More than 880,000 people have clicked through to The 4-Hour Chef's Amazon landing page. Amazon doesn't offer its authors conversion metrics, so it's hard to say how many of those people actually purchased the book. But it's an impressive amount of exposure. BitTorrent also sent nearly 300,000 people to the book's video trailer on YouTube and over 327,000 to Ferriss' website. Not bad. 

The Piracy Question 

But there's an elephant in the room: piracy. Just as easily as they can grab Ferriss' 4-Hour Chef promotional bundle on BitTorrent, users can find pirated copies of all three of his books. 

"If someone is willing to spend time finding a legit bootleg source and reading a DRM-broken hard-to-read copy of my book on a computer screen not intended for reading, just to avoid spending $12 or so, they weren't ever my core audience to begin with," Ferriss says. "If I get them, it's nothing but bonus points."

So, the Amazon/BitTorrent publishing hack seems to be working, for Ferriss at least. There are lessons to be learned here, but with the usual dose of caution. In the same way that Radiohead didn't single-handedly make "pay what you want" a viable model for all musicians, Ferriss's example is going to be of limited value to new authors. 

Still, it demonstrates the potential of today's platforms and protocols when it comes to one-upping long-entrenched players and leveling the playing field a bit. We all can't be Tim Ferriss, just like we all can't be Justin Timberlake. But just as the Internet has opened a new potential path to success for YouTube pop singers, platforms like Amazon and BitTorrent could be where tomorrow's authors find their audiences. 

Earlier this week, the book publishing industry hit a milestone. For the first time ever, a publisher successfully sued consumers for pirating books via BitTorrent. As a result of the lawsuit, a pair of New York residents will pay $7,000 in damages to John Wiley and Sons, the company that puts out the "For Dummies" series of instructional books. 

Sound familiar? With this litigation, Wiley borrowed a page from the playbook of the music industry, which became notorious a few years back for suing people for illegally sharing songs. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) eventually backed down from some of its most aggressive litigation after it became clear the strategy was doing little more than angering the most avid, dedicated music fans. Despite the epic failure of the RIAA's approach, worried book publishers are now beginning to think lawsuits can help them slow the bleeding of a business that is - like the music industry before it - being radically upended by digital technology. Let's hope this small victory for book publishers doesn't send the industry on the same disastrous path taken by the music labels.

Piracy Is A Fact Of Digital Life

Like music and movies, e-books get pirated. But that doesn't mean suing everyone you can find is the only possible response.

You can, for example, search for Tim Ferriss's bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek on the Pirate Bay and, within minutes, have a fresh copy sitting on your hard drive, ready to be transferred to your e-reading device of choice. Unlike Wiley and Sons, though, Ferriss has no plans to hunt down those unauthorized downloaders and haul them into court. Instead, he's teaming up with BitTorrent. 

Before we go any further, an important distinction needs to be made. BitTorrent, Inc is a San Francisco-based company that develops the official BitTorrent desktop client and generally serves as the public evangelist for the popular peer-to-peer file-sharing technology its cofounder Bram Cohen created in 2001. The company itself has little control over how the protocol is actually used in the wild. Frequently, as we're all well aware, the use case involves content piracy. It's a reputation BitTorrent, Inc is trying to shed.

Using BitTorrent To Promote - Not Steal - Content

Last month, the company formally teamed up with Ferriss to help him promote his new book, The 4-Hour Chef. The partnership gave Ferriss prime visual real estate on BitTorrent.com, his grinning mug slapped across the homepage of a site to which more than half a million people navigate to download the BitTorrent client everyday. It's the sort of exposure that would cost big bucks to buy. 

The campaign's call to action - to adopt the parlance of Internet marketers - wasn't just to buy his book on Amazon, although that was undoubtedly its goal. To help whet their appetites, users were prompted to download a bundle of free content offered exclusively through BitTorrent. If you weren't sure if you wanted to pay for a copy of The 4-Hour Chef, perhaps a sample chapter, behind-the-scenes videos and supplementary notes would help convince you. 

Since debuting in November, Tim Ferriss's BitTorrent content bundle has been downloaded more than 1.4 million times. While one should always be careful not to draw logically shaky conclusions about causation, it's hard to imagine that the promotion didn't help drive The 4-Hour Chef up the bestseller charts at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly, at least a little bit. It also didn't hurt that Ferriss was already a well-established, bestselling author.

This time around, though, Ferriss was looking for all the marketing and promotional help he could get. Rather than going with a traditional publisher, he had signed on with Amazon's new publishing arm. The move was frowned upon by already-beleaguered bricks-and-mortar booksellers, many of whom refused to carry Ferris's latest title. With this huge disadvantage in mind, he approached BitTorrent, whose previous experiments in content promotion (mostly with musicians) had generated some impressive numbers. 

Whether those download numbers translate directly into revenue for creators remains difficult to prove. Does the extra exposure of BitTorrent (and potential payoff if a formal partnership is involved) outweigh revenue lost to piracy? Again, hard to say. BitTorrent, Inc is hoping that experiments like Ferriss's will help answer those questions. In many ways, the future of the book publishing industry could rest on which piracy response they choose to follow: Tim Ferriss or John Wiley and Sons.

Last week, Guy Kawasaki joined us ReadWrite Editor-in-Chief Dan Lyons in San Francisco for the second ReadWrite Mix event, he shared the secrets of his new book: APE – Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. In the following clips, Guy discusses his unique writing process and how to leverage social media for promotion. Learn how he secured, within an hour of publishing, a bevy of five-star reviews on Amazon. Hint: You gotta trust people.

See ReadWrite Mix: Guy Kawasaki Talks Apple, Google & The Book Business

E-readers are screwed.

That's the main takeaway from Wednesdays ominously worded report from IHS, anyway. The numbers are pretty dramatic: By the end of the year, sales of dedicated ebook reading devices will have dropped 36% from 2011. Come 2016, says IHS, total e-reader sale volume will be just two-thirds of what it was last year.

Yikes. Is this really the death of e-readers? 

It makes perfect sense that e-reader sales are falling off a cliff. Tablets are eating their lunch. Not only has Apple sold 84 million iPads to date, but the companies who have dominated the e-reader market are themselves shipping tablets now. 

Consumers are quite naturally drawn to these multi-function, multimedia-capable gadgets that can stream movies, browse the Web, take photos, play Letterpress and do just about anything else app developers can dream up. And yes, those same devices - whose prices keep falling - let you read books too.  

My iPad Is Great, But I Really Want A Kindle

When Steve Jobs first unveiled the iPad, I thought it was absurd. Never would I need to supplement my laptop and iPhone with this giant iPod Touch, I declared.

Today, I use my iPad constantly. It serves as my alarm clock, morning newspaper, TV content provider, futuristic radio, bedtime magazine, digital cookbook and much else. It even helps me do my job. What an incredible gizmo. 

But you know what's the very top of my wish list? Amazon's Kindle Paper White. An e-reader of the very sort whose grave is allegedly being dug by my shiny new iPad. 

The thing about my iPad is that there's too much going on there. It's not quite as busy and distraction-prone as my laptop, but when I'm staring into the growing screen of my tablet, my brain knows about all the options it has. I can check Twitter, refresh my Gmail inbox one more time, page through Flipboard, catch up on my ever-overflowing Instapaper queue or see what videos are bubbling up on YouTube, ShowYou or Frequency. And I don't even play games or use chat apps on my iPad. 

Reading comprises the vast majority of what I do on my iPad. Probably 90% of all the words that my brain processes in a given month come from that glowing, 9.7-inch Retina display. I catch up on Google Reader and Flipboard, but I also delve into longer content on Instapaper, Longform and digital magazines. The thing I can never seem to make my way to is the Kindle app, where the books are waiting. 

The Underrated Value Of A Single-Use Device

That's why I want a Kindle. After a day of dinging notifications, multitasking and hopping from app to app, my brain could really use the respite of a device that does only one thing. 

Why, you might ask, don't I just pick up a paperback book and put the gadgets away?

I certainly do that from time to time, but the inescapable reality is that more and more content exists in digital space. Like analog records, I'll always have a physical bookshelf, but most of what I consume will be digital. There's just more new stuff there, and it's more easily accessible. Some big name authors are now going directly through Amazon, with or without a print edition. If I get a PDF copy of a new book or want to get a sample a chapter, I need to turn to a gadget to read those things. E-readers might be on the decline, but e-books aren't going anywhere. 

Perhaps I could just turn off my iPad's Wi-Fi, launch the Kindle app and, for crying out loud, exercise a little self-control. I do that from time to time, too. And it works. But sometimes I'd like to leave the backlit, multifunction gadgets at home and not even have the option to do other stuff. I'd also like to do read an e-book on the beach without squinting to see the text or risk dropping a $600 device in the sand. 

So the Kindle it is. I very much have room for both devices in my life, and I doubt I'm the only one.

All things considered, it makes complete sense that dedicated e-readers are selling less - and that that decline will continue as tablet prices drop. But I don't think we should write off e-readers off quite yet. At least, I hope not. I've got a hell of a reading queue to catch up on. 

If you walk into your local Barnes & Noble looking for a copy of Timothy Ferriss's new book, good luck. Even though he's a New York Times best selling author, the giant book retailer refuses to sell The 4-Hour Chef, the latest in his series of self-help books. 

Ferriss isn't worried. He's banking on the power of digital distribution to make up for any losses in print sales. Ironically, one of his most effective tools may end up being something most content creators have grown to fear, if not outright despise: BitTorrent.

After publishing two wildly successful books via traditional means, Ferriss decided to try something different. In August, he signed on with Amazon's new publishing arm to release the follow-up to his 2010 health and fitness guide, The 4-Hour Body. That ruffled the feathers of not just traditional publishers, but also brick-and-mortar retailers like Barnes and Noble, who object to the e-bookstore exclusivity Amazon requires of its authors. That's why you won't find Ferriss's latest opus down the street at Barnes & Noble. 

As fast as e-books are growing, the lack of a presence in the nation's largest physical book retailer is a still serious handicap. To combat it, Ferriss struck a deal with BitTorrent earlier this month to distribute an exclusive bundle of content and, he hopes, sell a few extra books. 

"We were both eager to do something to demonstrate that the same type of tools that disrupted music and film can be harnessed to benefit the content creators in publishing," says Ferriss. 

How BitTorrent Is Moving Beyond Piracy

But wait. BitTorrent? Aren't they the bad guys?

To be sure, forging a partnership with the company behind the same-peer-to-peer filesharing technology that fuels rampant piracy would be unthinkable for most major publishers. In fact, they're sometimes known to sue BitTorrent users for downloading e-books. But the San Francisco-based company is working hard to rebrand itself as a legitimate partner for content creators, and there's no better way to do that than by partnering with established creators like Ferriss.

For Ferriss, BitTorrent is just an incredibly efficient way to distribute content to a large number of users. And BitTorrent has plenty of them. When asked why he wanted to enter into this partnership, the first words out of Ferriss's mouth were "one hundred and sixty million users." It's hard to argue with that. 

Here's how it works: To coincide with the launch of his book, Ferriss put together a folder of additional, exclusive content: a 62-page PDF previewing the book, behind-the-scenes photos, videos and early, hand-marked notes. It's pretty meaty, but doesn't come anywhere close to spoiling the 672-page book he's trying to sell. 

It's not just that this content bundle is available for free to Bit Torrent users. It's that Ferriss's face - along with a link to download the bundle torrent and buy the book - is on Bit Torrent's homepage, from which hundreds of thousands of users download the file-sharing client every day. 

BitTorrent has been experimenting with this type of featured content for about two years. The list of artists it has partnered with includes increasingly higher profile names like The Counting Crows, DJ Shadow and Pretty Lights, an American DJ and producer. BitTorrent has also worked directly with the Internet Archive to make more than one petabyte of public-domain content available via the P2P network. 

It's all part of the company's effort not to just to distance itself from piracy, but to figure out how it can be a bigger part of the legitimate future of digital distribution. 

"If you look at what BitTorrent really is, it's quite simply the best way to move ones and zeros across the Internet," says Matt Mason, the company's Executive Director of Marketing. That makes it a valuable tool for creators, but also helps the company figure out its own strategy moving forward. 

"The reason we're doing all of this is to try and figure out what to build next," says Mason. That is, if these experiments work, the company can develop tools to help publishers and artists launch their own promotional campagns and take even better advantage of the platform. 

Is This Experiment Working?

So does partnering with BitTorrent work? The early numbers look promising, even if they're not all the kind of hard dollar figures media executives want to see. The payoff is less direct that that, but it can still be huge. Pretty Lights, for example, may or may not have sold more records as a result of publishing his BitTorrent bundle of free music and video of a live performance. But after his bundle soared to the top of Pirate Bay's download chart, the DJ saw a 700% increase in traffic to his website, collected 100,000 email addresses and, probably not entirely by coincidence, sold out two concerts at the Red Rocks amphitheater in Colorado. 

For Ferriss, it's still too early to tell. But the initial numbers aren't bad. In the first week of the campaign, his bundle has been downloaded 211,000 times, BitTorrent told ReadWrite. More than 85,000 people have clicked through to the book's listing on Amazon (no word on how many ordered it), while 27,000 people viewed the book's trailer on YouTube. 

Even if the book only sold 100 extra copies, Ferris says, the promotion would have been worth it to him, because the amount of setup time required was so minimal. He expects to sell far more copies than that, but the real value comes in experimenting with new distribution channels. He is "not overly concerned" about the prospect of his e-book itself being shared on BitTorrent, which he views as a valuable promotional tool. 

"One of many reasons to embrace new technologies or new applications of existing technologies is the benefit that you get of being first," says Ferriss. If nothing else, such a paradoxical-seeming partnership has a way of garnering more media coverage than a typical book launch. 

"It's a wide open field for people to play in," Ferriss says. "Very few people have taken advantage of this so I would absolutely recommend it."

Well, so much for light reading. Social news stalwart Flipboard is expanding beyond feeds like RSS and Twitter, introducing a Books category today for its iOS app.

Flipboard’s most literate new category will serve as a portal to Apple’s iBookstore, which is stuffed with over 1.5 million titles. Each book in Flipboard offers a synopsis and an iBook link, so readers can readily purchase a must-read for their iBooks library. 

The Books section is divided into categories including literature, biographies and memoirs and history -- and less-erudite readers can flip through cookbooks and travel guides too. The new category launched with tailor-made bookshelves for the United States, Canada, the U.K., Brazil, Australia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain. Naturally, it sounds like Android Flipboard users won't see the new category. 

Flipboard is a social magazine by definition, but with the iBooks integration, the app will move into catalog territory. We can only imagine that swiping through Flipboard’s intoxicatingly visual bookshelves might have some patrons lining up for their Apple-issued library cards.

Nobody doubts that the classroom of the future will look very different than it does today. It will, at the very least, involve fewer dead trees and be much more tapped into that globe-spanning network of knowledge we call the Internet. Learning will also be even more geographically distributed than it is today. And it's increasingly looking like tablet computers will be at the heart of the whole experience. Like it or not, Apple is leading the charge. 

What Apple Showed

When Apple made its first official foray into digital textbooks earlier this year, I was skeptical. It seemed clear that iBooks 2, iBooks Author and the new "textbooks" section of the iBookstore would not revolutionize the education market anytime soon, even if the longterm potential was obvious. Tuesday, Apple shared some early results from those efforts and revealed the next phase of its overhaul of education. It's definitely onto something. 

Most of the 100 million iPads sold worldwide were purchased by consumers and businesses, but a growing number of those buyers are school districts. In the last nine months, 2,500 classrooms have started using iBooks textbooks, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced. Their content now covers 80% of the core high school curriculum in the United States. It's not a bad start, but Apple has a long way to go before iBooks makes an iTunes-like impact. 

The next wave of that impact won't come from iBooks 3 or the new version of iBooks Author, which are both nice, but relatively minor updates. If anything from Tuesday's event will help push digital textbook adoption forward, it's the hardware. Specifically, the iPad Mini. By offering a $329 tablet, Apple suddenly made iPad adoption notably more affordable for cash-strapped school districts. Apple also released the fourth generation 10-inch iPad, which should help drive down the price of the company's older devices as well. 

Indeed, the cost of these iPad-based programs is one of their biggest logistical handicaps, especially in urban school districts. I live in Philadelphia, where the public schools are forever plagued by budget cuts. The teachers I know have to ask for donations from the community (or pay from their own pocket) just to ensure's there are enough pencils and reams of paper. Their students aren't going to see $500 tablet computers anytime soon. A $329 iPad is bit easier to swallow for educators set on bringing iOS, rather than cheaper Android or Windows tablets into the classroom. Give it a few years, and these things will be dirt cheap. 

Apple's Not the Only Player, But It's Still Apple

Of course, Apple has plenty of competition, both on the hardware front and when it comes to educational content. Because of the iPad's premium price tag, some schools are experimenting with Kindle Fires and other Android-based tablets. The 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab, for example, is considerably cheaper than the iPad mini. One fifth grade classroom that tried deploying the Galaxy Tab found it to be effective overall, but software glitches continually interrupted the experience for students. That's something that the Apple fan boys will be quick to point out: The iPad, as they say, just works.

There's some truth to that. Compared to Android, iOS is more polished and intuitive, but what Android tablets may lack in user experience, they typically make up in more affordable hardware. 

The iBookstore isn't the first place to offer digital textbooks, either. Startups like Inkling, Chegg and Kno were reimagining the textbook for a digital world long before Apple started getting serious about its role in education's future. Meanwhile, Amazon has its own e-textbook storefront and rental program and Barnes and Noble offers its own digital learning tool called Nook Study. 

While the educatiuonal space is filling up, it's also relatively young. So far, Apple has made one of  the most direct pushes into it. We don't see Amazon pushing the Kindle Fire as the next big thing in classrooms, for instance. Not yet, anyway.

As is often the case, Apple has a tremendous advantage by virtue of the fact that it's Apple. The iPad's dominant position in the marketplace gives it the best shot of carving out a meaningful segment of the education market, where its sights are now very deliberately set.