OR Books

OR Books

Type	Private
Industry	Books, printing and publishing
Founded	2010
Founder(s)	John Oakes and Colin Robinson
Headquarters	New York City, New York, United States
Website	orbooks.com

OR Books is a New York-based independent publishing house founded by two veterans of the publishing industry, John Oakes and Colin Robinson, in 2009.^[1] The company, a "digital upstart", ^[2] claims to offer a revolutionary approach to publishing by printing on demand, selling directly to the customer, and focusing on creative promotion through traditional media and the internet. It generally does not sell its books through stores or wholesalers: it "sells directly to customers who order from the OR Books website, eliminating unsold inventory, doing away with deep discounts to retailers, and sharing more of the profit with authors. Cus­tomers may order print copies or digital versions; OR Books prints and delivers copies only when they are ordered." ^[3]

On its site, OR Books states that it "embraces progressive change in politics, culture and the way we do business." By selling directly to the reader, and avoiding large discount chains, it says substantial resources are made available for marketing and promotion. "...At OR Books, our calculation is that, for the amount of money we would have to give Amazon, we can do a better job finding customers ourselves. We know who our audience is, we share their interests, we visit the same websites and read the same writers," wrote company co-founder Robinson.^[4]

OR Books is best known for publishing Going Rouge, a parody of the Sarah Palin biography, which went on to become a New York Times Best Seller in 2009. Since then they have published books by Sue Coe, Norman Finkelstein, Gordon Lish, Moustafa Bayoumi, Bill McKibben, Eileen Myles, Douglas Rushkoff, Laura Flanders, Chris Lehmann, and Lisa Dierbeck.

Founders

According to OR's website, John Oakes co-founded the publishing company Four Walls Eight Windows. When his company was purchased by the Avalon Publishing Group, he became publisher of Thunder’s Mouth Press, co-publisher of Nation Books, and vice president of Avalon. Colin Robinson, a former senior editor at Scribner, was previously managing director of Verso Books and publisher of The New Press.

Joint ventures

In September 2010, OR Books announced a partnership with a writers' collective known as Mischief & Mayhem, whose members include Dale Peck, Lisa Dierbeck, Joshua Furst, DW Gibson, and Choire Sicha.^[5]

In what the industry newsblog "Shelf Awareness" termed a "very significant...move," St. Mark’s Bookshop and OR Books announced a joint venture to enable the store’s customers to buy select books on OR’s list from the bookstore’s website.^[6]

References

External links

• Company site
• Mischief + Mayhem
• Interview with John Oakes on O'Reilly Media's "Tools of Change for Publishing"
• Publishers Weekly discusses OR Books in its 2010 roundup
• "Independent Publisher" article about the success of Going Rouge
• Interview with Colin Robinson on NPR's On the Media
• "Publishing Perspectives": "OR Books Preaches Elegant Direct Model"
• "Words & Music Festival 2011" featured showdown between OR co-publisher John Oakes and Random House editor