Sparking an ebook revolution

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Trends, Success Stories Formulating an Online
Content Delivery Strategy
Sameer ShariffFounder CEOImpelsys Inc.
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Agenda
Case Studies of Success
Trends Challenges
Formulating your Strategy
iPublishCentral
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Who we are?

• From inception till 2009, Impelsys has powered
  more than2000 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

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We serve 200 publishers across geographies
segments.
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Key takeaways from this presentation
Discoverability
Experiment
Control
Relationship
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Trends
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Trends in reading
Reading and buying trends of printed 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)
(Source AAP, http//www.publishers.org/main/Indus
tryStats/indStats_02.htm)
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Trends in reading
Availability of these different types of media -
vying for reader's attention and dollars
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Trends in reading
How do you get to understand your customers? The
web is changing consumption and your future
markets will change.
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Web is changing reader behavior

• Trend is towards searching and foraging for
  information
• Increased 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)
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Web is changing reader behavior

• 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

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Web is changing reader behavior
You must give the consumers what they
need/requireProvide content andnot books
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Reference reader trends
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 Global Faculty eBook Survey, 2007,
February (http//www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?smw
S8CU8W9N_2fIwRuMq5gNMsw_3d_3d)
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Market trends
Source IDPF Industry Statistics
(http//www.idpf.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm
)
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Consumer expectation
Participative I matter and so does my opinion
Interactive audio, video, animations

• Available
• Anywhere, Anytime

• Cost
• micro-payments

(source www.idpf.org/events/presentations/Frankf
urt08/FBF08_RandomHouseUK_Duggan.ppt - )
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Trends
Challenges
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Challenges of going e

• Multiple formats, hardware devices, software
• Which one will win? What formats?

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Challenges of going e

• Cost and Risk
• Cost of experimenting and risk of competition

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Challenges of going e

• Conversion costs
• Tagging/Metadata (how deep?)
• Time to Market

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Challenges of going e

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

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SuccessStories
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ExperimentsWorld Bank e-Library
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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
And the results are visible in their numbers
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.
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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/Seminar
io20STM/Intervencion_Kalk_Valentina.pdf)
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ExperimentsHarper CollinsBrowse Inside
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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)
Harper Collins launched their Browse Inside
program in 2006, becoming one of the first
publishers to do so
It brings powerful features that retail
aggregators, like Amazon, offer on their site
Experiments Harper Collins Browse 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/digital
book08/lHulse08.pdf)
They were also able to gain valuable insights
into what the market wants
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Experiments Harper Collins Browse Inside
(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)
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Case StudyBenchmark Education Company
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Benchmark Education Company was working on
English Language Learner series, targeting non
English speaking countries. Central to this was
the application of technology and ecommerce to
enhance distribution, improve service, and to
reduce cost.
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• Benchmark Education Company, started on
  iPublishCentral early on - as a beta customer and
  went live in the month of April 2009

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They now have an electronic online delivery
platform through which they sell their audio
books to institutions and individual
subscribers. They did this with no upfront
investment They did it with an aggressive go to
market time schedule Enabled them to penetrate
into international market
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ExperimentsHarper CollinsBrowse Inside
Case StudyMIT Press
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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.
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They went live in the month of March and offer
400 niche titles for sale in the electronic form
through iPublishCentral.
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All that MIT Press needed to launch was their
title PDF, ONIX metadata and book covers.
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Since launch, towards the end of March... Nearly
18000 pages have been previewed
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Since launch, towards the end of
March... Visitors from about 180 countries have
viewed widgets
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Since launch towards end of March... Visitors
from nearly half these countries have clicked on
the widgets to see book preview pages
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Since launch towards end of March... Total time
spent on the book preview pages is 4623459 hours
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Since launch towards end of March... Average
time spent per visit is about 4.5 mins
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Since launch towards end of March... Google
alone has crawled through the sample pages about
3500 times, apart from other search engines
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Since launch towards end of March... Nearly 2
of unique visitors who saw the preview pages have
ended up buying a title
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Formulating your strategy
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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

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Increase visibility

• 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

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Establish relationships

• 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

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Control

• 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

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Introducing iPublishCentral
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• 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

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• 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 TM
  basis

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Widgets
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Portals
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Key takeaways from this presentation
Discoverability
Experiment
Control
Relationship
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• 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
  FW Media
• iPublishCentral also helped us open up new
  markets internationally Tom Reycraft,
  Benchmark Education Company
• 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.c
om