Sparking an
e-book
revolution
Sameer Shariff
Founder & CEO
TOC 2009

Agenda
Case Studies of Success
Trends & Challenges
Formulating your Strategy iPublishCentral

Who we are?
• From inception till 2008, 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
Discoverability
Experiment
Control Relationship

Trends

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

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 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)

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

Web is changing reader behavior
You must give the consumers
what they need/require
Provide content and
not “books”

Search
Trends
The number of people searching
to know more about ebooks has
doubled in the last 4 years
according to google trends.
Source: Google Trends (http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm)

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?sm=wS8CU8W9N_2fIwRuMq5gNMsw_3d_3d)

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

Consumer Expectation
Participative:
Interactive:
“I matter and so does my opinion”
audio, video, animations
Available:
Cost: Anywhere, Anytime
micro-payments
(source: www.idpf.org/events/presentations/Frankfurt08/FBF08_RandomHouseUK_Duggan.ppt - )

Trends
Challenges

Challenges of going e
Multiple formats, hardware devices, software
Which one will win? What formats?

Challenges of going e
Cost and Risk
Cost of experimenting and risk of competition

Challenges of going e
Conversion costs
Tagging/Metadata (how deep?)
Time to Market

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?

Success
Stories

Experiments:
World Bank
e-Library

Sparking an
e-book
revolution
Sameer Shariff
Founder & CEO
TOC 2009

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 Collins
Browse Inside

Amazon, who pioneered offering
Harper Collins It brings powerful features
samples on a large scale in
launched their Browse that retail aggregators, like
2003, reported about 9%
Inside program in 2006, Amazon, offer on their site
increase of print sales across
becoming one of the
120,000 titles in 5 days after the
first publisher to do so
Search Inside capability was
available on their site
(
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_/ai
)
Experiments: Harper Collins Browse
Inside
They were also able to
Harper Collins had a similar experience with sales
gain valuable insights into
Harper Collins reported print sales increase of 30% and 250% what the market wants
for specific titles using their Browse Inside functionality
(http://www.idpf.org/events/presentations/digitalbook08/lHulse08.pdf)

Harper Collins Browse Inside
Browse Inside PDF Free Download
Visitors 83,102 20,000
Visits 85,867 30,000
Downloads 0 15,000
Page 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
(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:
Random House
Beyond EBooks

Random House Beyond EBooks
Along with their own book preview program, called “Browse & Search”, Random
House is also looking beyond ebooks and now offers Personalized Books,
Chunked Content (for $2.99 for each chapter), Custom Content Selections and Ad
supported content
(Source: IDPF Digital Book 2008: Random House Update, Matt Shatz, 2008,
www.openebook.org/events/presentations/digitalbook08/mShatz.pdf)

Experiments: Random House Beyond
EBooks
2,824,527 184,444 254, 383
Book Pages Viewed People who have viewed a widget Number of widgets viewed
Random House has effectively increased page views and in
turn the popularity of their content by being visible
(Source: Matt Shatz, IDPF Digital Book2007,
http://www.idpf.org/events/presentations/digitalbook07/Matt%20Shatz%20-%20Random%20House.pdf)

Experiments:
O’Reilly Safari
and Beyond

Started in 2001 as a web based
O'Reilly Media has been at the
subscription model, it is now the #2
forefront in experimenting with
channel behind Amazon for O'Reilly
different models of electronic
in sales
delivery
(Source:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/competition-in-the-ebook-marke.html
)
Experiments: o’Reilly Safari and Beyond
They also experimented with
Offering a NetFlix-like model of various tools like SafariU that
lending books, it remains DRM allowed custom mash-up
free offering as many prints and publishing of books for
copies a subscriber wants to make University professors

O'Reilly now offers books They service various channels
in PDF, Mobi and ePUB like Kindle, iPhone and Stanza
formats as direct
downloads
Experiments: o’Reilly Safari and Beyond
This has resulted in a strong market expansion strategy
where O'Reilly now meets the needs of all types of
customers

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 Visiblity
• 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

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

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

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
Discoverability
Experiment
Control Relationship

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