Trends, Success Stories & Emerging eBook Business Models

www.ipublishcentral.com

Trends, Success Stories & Emerging eBook Business Models

Sameer ShariffFounder & CEOImpelsys Inc.

Agenda

Trends & Challenges Case Studies of Success

Formulating your Strategy iPublishCentral


Who we are?• From inception till 2009, Impelsys has powered more than

2000 projects for billion dollar publishers to small million dollar publishers

• We have spent millions of dollars on our core technologies, iPlatform, VirtualPages and iDAMS. We have built them over the past 4 years and the technologies are serving millions of readers worldwide

• We launched iPublishCentral (ipublishcentral.com) as a Software as a Service (SaaS) model leveraging our years of experience. The goal is to bring down costs of delivery so that any publisher can build an online strategy


We serve 200+ publishers across geographies & segments.


Key takeaways from this presentation

Control

DiscoverabilityExperiment

Relationship


Trends


Trends in reading

(Source: AAP, http://www.publishers.org/main/IndustryStats/indStats_02.htm)

Reading and buying trends of books not encouraging

3.2 % increase from 2006 with a compound growth rate of 2.5 % per year since 2002

This increase, the highest in the last 26 years, is still insignificant when compared to video games (19%) and movies (5.3%)


Trends in reading

Availability of these different types of media - vying for reader's attention and dollars


Trends in reading

How do you get to understand your customers? The web is changing consumption and your future markets will change.


Web is changing reader behavior

Trend is towards searching and foraging for informationIncreased use of Google and Wikipedia for reading and research

Bits and pieces of information are weaved together from multiple sources like scent trails

(Source: Xerox PARC, http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/%7Eechi/papers/chi2000/scent.pdf)



Is making content visible the first step in the solution?

Will it provide a strong enough “scent” for people to browse and ultimately buy?

Google Book Search



You must give the consumers what they need/require

Provide content andnot “books”


Source: Google Trends (http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm)

Search trendsThe number of people searching to know more about ebooks has doubled in the last 4 years according to google trends.


Reference reader trends

(Source: Global Faculty eBook Survey, 2007, February (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=wS8CU8W9N_2fIwRuMq5gNMsw_3d_3d)

Do you prefer using online resources or print for your research, class presentation and instruction? No. of respondents 831

1 in 2 people or around 50% prefer doing research reading online.


Source: IDPF Industry Statistics (http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm)

Market trends


Participative: “I matter and so does my opinion”

(source: www.idpf.org/events/presentations/Frankfurt08/FBF08_RandomHouseUK_Duggan.ppt - )

Consumer expectation

Interactive: audio, video, animations

Cost: micro-payments

Available: Anywhere, Anytime


Trends

Challenges


Challenges of going e

Multiple formats, hardware devices, softwareWhich one will win? What formats?



Cost and RiskCost of experimenting and risk of competition



Conversion costsTagging/Metadata (how deep?)Time to Market



Challenges in depending on othersWho controls it?Who is gaining insights into user behavior?Who understands the market needs?Who can develop products that meet these needs?


SuccessStories


Experiments:

World Bank e-Library


World bank bought back XML files from Netlibrary to develop their own strategy along with being present on other channels.

Today, they have the external channels and their own program as well.

Experiments: World Bank e-Library

Today, they have the external channels and their own program as well.

They have effectively implemented discoverability through Google Book Search, reach through multiple channels, control and insight into their market through their own program.

And the results are visible in their numbers


Experiments: World Bank Results and Sales Contribution

Source: Channels for Online Publishing: The Experience of World Bank Publications, Valentina Kalk, 2008 (http://www.editoresmadrid.org/Seminario%20STM/Intervencion_Kalk_Valentina.pdf)


Experiments:

Harper CollinsBrowse Inside


Harper Collins had a similar experience with sales

Harper Collins reported print sales increase of 30% and 250% for specific titles using their Browse Inside functionality (http://www.idpf.org/events/presentations/digitalbook08/lHulse08.pdf)

Experiments: Harper Collins Browse Inside

Harper Collins launched their Browse Inside program in 2006, becoming one of the first publisher to do so

It brings powerful features that retail aggregators, like Amazon, offer on their site

Amazon, who pioneered offering samples on a large scale in 2003, reported about 9% increase of print sales across 120,000 titles in 5 days after the Search Inside capability was available on their site(http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_/ai_109467316)

They were also able to gain valuable insights into what the market wants


(Source: Experiments with free digital content, presented at IDPF Digital Book 2008 by Leslie Hulse, VP Digital Business Development, Harper Collins, http://www.idpf.org/events/presentations/digitalbook08/lHulse08.pdf)

Experiments: Harper Collins Browse Inside

Browse Inside PDF Free Download

Visitors 83,102 20,000Visits 85,867 30,000Downloads 0 15,000Page Views 3,827,306

Avg Page Views per Visit 46

Avg. Visit Duration 15:55

Clicks on Buy Link 1,177

Emailed to a Friend 16,236


Experiments:

O’Reilly Safariand Beyond


They also experimented with various tools like SafariU that allowed custom mash-up publishing of books for University professors

Experiments: o’Reilly Safari and Beyond

O'Reilly Media has been at the forefront in experimenting with different models of electronic delivery

Started in 2001 as a web based subscription model, it is now the #2 channel behind Amazon for O'Reilly in sales (Source: http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/competition-in-the-ebook-marke.html)

Offering a NetFlix-like model oflending books, it remains DRMfree offering as many prints andcopies a subscriber wants to make


O'Reilly now offers books in PDF, Mobi and ePUB formats as direct downloads

Experiments: o’Reilly Safari and Beyond

They service various channels like Kindle, iPhone and Stanza

This has resulted in a strong market expansion strategy where O'Reilly now meets the needs of all types of customers


Experiments:

Harper CollinsBrowse InsideCase Study:

MIT Press


MIT Press, started on iPublishCentral early on - as a beta customer.

They helped us refine the system and have been partners in trying out what works and what does not.


They went live about 1.5 months back and offer 400 niche titles for sale in the electronic form through iPublishCentral.


All that MIT Press needed to launch was their title PDF, ONIX metadata and book covers.


They now have an electronic book store through which they can sell to institutions and individual subscribers.

They also offer free content samples that can travel as widgets.


Since launch, towards the end of March...

Nearly 18000+ pages have been previewed


Since launch, towards the end of March...

Visitors from about 180 countries have viewed widgets


Since launch towards end of March...

Visitors from nearly half these countries have clicked on the widgets to see book preview pages



Total time spent on the book preview pages is 462:34:59 hours



Average time spent per visit is about 4.5 mins



Google alone has crawled through the sample pages about 3500 times, apart from other search engines



Nearly 2% of unique visitors who saw the preview pages have ended up buying a title


Formulating your strategy


Why should you experiment?

• Others are doing it, so should you

• Run your own program, along with other existing strategies – it does not hurt

• It helps in gaining visibility and establishing a relationship with your readers

• The world is changing and you can leverage this change

• Your networks are your future currency


• Increase visibility by being available where your readers are

• Be relevant and useful

• Introduce your books and create brand awareness

• Increase page views to gain SEO and SEM

• Get insight into what your readers are doing

• Offer value to potentially increase sales

Increase visiblity


• Relationships matter

• Listen, understand and respond

• Own your readers and their mind share

• Reach out to readers with news and updates

• Word-of-Mouth works and social media is the easiest way to get it started

• Targeted marketing is better than broadcast advertising

Establish relationships


• Who controls these relationships?

• Is it sufficient to have retailers like Amazon and search engines like Google manage them?

• How do you build your infrastructure for the future - the investment does not have to be great

Control


Introducing iPublishCentral


• iPublishCentral is low-cost and low-risk Software as a Service (SaaS) focussed on publishing

• It helps publishers to formulate, run and control their own E-Strategy

• The vision of iPublishCentral is to help publishers through a self-serve model to market, distribute and deliver content online

• Launched during Frankfurt Book Fair 2008, we currently have more than 150 publishers on it


• It helps publishers convert capital expenditure plans to revenue expenditure – with a pay-as-you-go model

• It takes away the need for up-front investments in installations, operations, support, maintenance and training

• Automated content workflow and ready-to-go functionality offers zero-conversion costs and quicker time to market

• Fully backed with a SLA

• It's entirely self service, but for publishers short on time and resources – support on a T&M basis


Widgets

Portals


Key takeaways from this presentation

Control

DiscoverabilityExperiment

Relationship


Thank You.Tools like iPublishCentral, make these experiments possible

“iPublishCentral is a self-service model that allows us to deploy viral tools across our 70+ web sites, giving us the opportunity to quickly market content, increase sales and engage our online community” - Sara Domville, President of F+W Media.

“Impelsys is the company to watch over the next few years” - Steve Paxhia, Seybold Report

“iPublishCentral is poised at the right place at the right time because it encourages publishers, big and small, to experiment with web technologies” - Marisa Peacock, CMSWire.

To see how iPublishCentral can make a difference to your business, sign up at www.ipublishcentral.com


Technology

Trends, Success Stories & Emerging eBook Business Models