SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--BitTorrent and best-selling author Tim Ferriss have combined forces today to promote the upcoming book The 4-Hour Chef. The first release for Mr. Ferriss since signing to Amazon's new publishing imprint, the book signals a leap in an industry that is increasingly becoming a digital business. With its audience of over 160 million monthly active users, BitTorrent offers Mr. Ferriss a unique and viable multimedia distribution model for promoting The 4-Hour Chef to a relevant audience.
The 4-Hour Chef is a practical and unusual guide to mastering both cooking and life, featuring recipes, tips and tricks from chess prodigies, chefs, professional athletes, master sommeliers, supermodels, and everyone in between. It is the latest in Mr. Ferriss' 4-Hour book series, which espouses the power of meta-learning and debunks the "10,000 hour" rule of mastering a skill. With the recent boycott of Amazon published books by US retail chains, including all of Barnes & Noble, The 4-Hour Chef is poised to become the most widely banned book in US history when it hits the market on November 20, 2012.
"The nature of publishing has fundamentally changed,” offered Tim Ferriss. “The business models and marketing must change to reflect what consumers want, and these wants can be harnessed to hugely benefit the content producer: the writer, the musician, etc. BitTorrent is a technology and ecosystem that is part of this sustainable future for content. There's no turning back, and I want to embrace the change-makers."
"Tim has been disruptive and inspirational," stated Eric Klinker, CEO of BitTorrent, Inc. "He is also a visionary who understands that solving the problems in the content businesses means embracing digital technologies like BitTorrent as we strive to make digital media more viable for artists and fans."
BitTorrent is a people-powered network of more than 160 million active monthly users worldwide, connected by a suite of products that allow people to move content around the Internet efficiently and at scale. With more users than Hulu, Netflix and Spotify combined, BitTorrent offers content producers a unique and relevant way to raise awareness with a discerning audience; an audience proven more likely to purchase content than the average Internet user.
The promotion will include a unique content Bundle for the BitTorrent community, with details to be announced on the Bundle’s content in coming the days. The Bundle formula has proven wildly successful recently for such content producers as Counting Crows, Pretty Lights and Death Grips, who all worked with BitTorrent Inc. in 2012. Through the first six months of this year, Musicmetric reported 405 million music downloads worldwide in the BitTorrent ecosystem. In that same time period, BitTorrent Inc. worked with artists to deliver more than 124 million licensed, legal music downloads; helping emerging and established creators monetize their content via the BitTorrent ecosystem.
“That means BitTorrent music Bundles account for 35% of the total music download ecosystem, and directly benefitted the artists which BitTorrent worked with” added Klinker. “We’re really excited to work with Tim to see if we can add the same kind of value for one of the most talented authors in book publishing.”
For additional information about this marketing agreement, please follow blog.bittorrent.com.
About Timothy Ferriss
Timothy Ferriss is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body. He’s called “The Superman of Silicon Valley” by Wired magazine, one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People”, and “the world’s best guinea pig” by Newsweek, which ranks him the 7th most powerful personality in their Digital 100 Power Index 2012. He is an adviser and faculty member at Singularity University, based at NASA Ames Research Center, which focuses on leveraging accelerating technologies to address global problems. Tim has featured in a range of media including The New York Times, The New Yorker, TIME, Forbes, The Economist, The Today Show, 20/20, Nightline, The View, Dr. Oz, and Rachael Ray among many others. He lives in San Francisco.
About BitTorrent
BitTorrent is one of the world's leading peer-based technology companies. We maintain a globally recognized ecosystem of technology protocols, consumer software, and consumer electronics devices that help people find, share and move digital media. We are the creators of the BitTorrent protocol and proponents of an open Internet. Our technologies are used by hundreds of millions of people around the world and currently drive between 20% and 40% of global Internet traffic. BitTorrent is based in San Francisco and has offices in Tokyo, Seoul, Krakow and Minsk. Please visit www.bittorrent.com for more information.