It’s just been announced that the San Francisco–based startup Aer.io (pronounced “Aereo” and formerly known as Aerbook) has been acquired by Ingram Content Group. Ingram is the leading distributor in publishing and is the corporate operation behind both Lightning Source (for medium and big publishers) and IngramSpark (for authors).
The Aer.io software, as founding CEO Ron Martinez explains it, “puts a self-service front-end on Ingram.” Think of Ingram as a huge construction crane. It distributes content—huge numbers of books. What Aer.io does is provide tools that let users drive Ingram’s crane, building the distribution and commercial structures they need.
There’s still much to learn—the merger of the two companies is brand-new—but we spoke with IngramSpark program manager Robin Cutler, and she confirms, “Yes, the plan is to integrate Aer.io into IngramSpark to offer authors even more flexibility in managing and selling their content. We’re at the very beginning of working out the details, but I’m very excited about the chance to work with Ron to get this thing up and going.”
In his interview at The FutureBook, Martinez makes a quick reference to the potential for authors: “An author can simply push their book up into the Aer.io network, and also make it available to anyone else in the network to sell—it’s really a network model, and it has been designed and architected to support this rich and diverse ecosystem.”
Bottom line: When fully implemented, Aer.io’s integration into IngramSpark could mean a new avenue for self-directed e-commerce for writers. This might translate into a store on an author’s own website, for example. And one of the fascinating elements of the Aer.io program is that it makes it possible for others in the network to sell things, too—meaning that authors might be able to sell each other’s books, both in digital and print-on-demand formats.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
