Trends, Success Stories & Emerging eBook Business Models

www.ipublishcentral.co
m

Trends, Success Stories &
Emerging eBook Business
Models

Sameer Shariff
Founder & CEO
Impelsys Inc.

www.ipublishcentral.com

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

Experiment Discoverability

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)


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 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

Interactive: Participative:
audio, video, animations “I matter and so does my opinion”

Cost: Available:
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?



Cost and Risk
Cost of experimenting and risk of competition



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



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


World bank bought back XML files Today, they have the
from Netlibrary to develop their external channels and their
own strategy along with being own program as well.
present on other channels.

Experiments: World Bank e-Library

Today, they have the
external channels They have effectively implemented
And the results
and their own discoverability through Google
are visible in
program as well. Book Search, reach through
their numbers
multiple channels, control and
insight into their market through
their own program.


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


Harper Collins It brings powerful features Amazon, who pioneered offering
launched their Browse that retail aggregators, like samples on a large scale in
Inside program in 2006, Amazon, offer on their site 2003, reported about 9%
becoming one of the increase of print sales across
first publisher to do so 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_1094
)

Experiments: Harper Collins Browse
Inside

Harper Collins had a similar experience with sales They were also able to
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)


Experiments: 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:
O’Reilly Safari
and Beyond


O'Reilly Media has been at the Started in 2001 as a web based
forefront in experimenting with subscription model, it is now the #2
different models of electronic channel behind Amazon for O'Reilly
delivery in sales
(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


Experiments:
Harper Collins
Case Study:
Browse Inside
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 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


Portals


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

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