MARKETING BOOKS IN A
WORLD OF
DISCOVERABILITY
STANDING OUT AMONGST
20,000,000+ BOOKS
ONLINE

Oxford University Press
• Over 35,000 ISBN’s in print, 20,000+ ac?ve
• Dis?nct Types of publishing:
Trade
–
Academic/Professional
–
Reference
–
Higher Educa?on
–
Journals
–
School/Children's
–
English Language Teaching
–
• Over 12,000 ebooks in UPDF format
• Over 4,500 in XML

OUP in Google Book Search (GBS)
 Initial Plan was to put in
Click to Buy Conversion Rates
5,000+ titles and monitor
progress for a year Buy % Buys Income
1% 7,348 $293,927
 Higher Ed, Reference,
2% 14,696 $587,854
Medicine, and “misc adoption
titles” were excluded from 3% 22,045 $881,782
program 4% 29,393 $1,175,709
 15,564 titles into Google 5% 36,741 $1,469,636
Book Search 6% 44,089 $1,763,563
– 143,822,674 book pages 7% 51,437 $2,057,490
viewed 8% 58,785 $2,351,418
– 734,818 “buy the book” clicks
9% 66,134 $2,645,345
– 47.21 buy click per book on
10% 73,482 $2,939,272
average
– $40 Average book price

Its a Full-Text Search World
• Google Book Search has millions of titles that
internet users can discover via full text
searches
• The Settlement with the Authors Guild and
AAP gives them approximately 20,000,000
more titles
• Little or no control over how your titles are
indexed as full text crawling cannot be
manipulated to your specific marketing
message

What if You Started with XML?
• By producing books in XML one can
create “chunkable” content
• The “chunkability” can create endless
iterations of the same content
• Specific chunks of content can be
displayed to enable market messaging –
much more efficiently than relying on the
right phrase found via full text search

Real-Life Example
Oxford Scholarship Online
• Over 3,000 titles in OSO
all in XML
• Every book has:
• Chapter abstracts
• Chapter Indices
• Chapter Keywords
• Primary Intent was A+I
(Abstract & Index)
Services
• Google Discoverability is
current application
• XML editorial and
production workflow
allows for evolving
applications of content

The Big Picture
• Starting with XML is the only way to cost
effectively create flexible content
• Flexible Content can be manipulated for
any marketing use or message
• Flexible Content leads to custom
applications for any number of uses
including new or additional content.