"The University Press D2C Opportunity"

1. The University Press D2C
Opportunity
Joseph J. Esposito
AAUP Annual Conference
June 2014

2. Background of Study
• Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
• PI: Marlie Wasserman, Director, Rutgers
University Press
• With help from the staff at Rutgers
• Extensive participation from the U. press
community
• Special thanks to Peter Berkery’s crew at AAUP

3. Topics
• What is D2C?
• Nature of the study
• A sample of findings
• Problems
• Opportunities

4. Methodology
• Online survey of university presses
• Follow-up phone calls
• Interviews with other industry participants
(publishers from other industry segments,
vendors)
• Ongoing blogging at Scholarly Kitchen to float
ideas and collect comments
• Written report due no later than October

5. What is D2C?
• Direct to consumer
• “Consumer” means an individual, not a mass
market or entertainment audience
• This has nothing to do with libraries
• Most U. press books are sold to individuals,
but on an indirect basis

6. What the Presses Told Us?
• Current practices with D2C
• Issues with ebooks
• The motivation behind D2C
• Biggest challenges
• The Amazon factor
• Current and hoped-for sales

7. Current Practices for D2C
• Most presses have D2C programs
• A smaller number sell ebooks D2C
• Typically, email (among other methods) is
used to drive D2C sales
• Early stages of database marketing
• Privacy issues are underexamined
• Mixed messages on building Web traffic
• Few good mobile solutions

8. Issues with Ebooks
• Large gap between presses that are
comfortable hosting ebooks and those that
are not
• Strong support for DRM
• No private-label apps discovered
• Many presses use BiblioVault and CoreSource
as DADs
• Pricing

9. Why D2C?
• Always seeking new channels
• Easier than ever to experiment
• Consolidation of retail sector
• Potential for higher margins
• Collection of user data
• “Begin a relationship with our reader”: the
most common response

10. What about Amazon?
• Will undercut presses on pricing and service
• Not likely to retaliate—scholarly publishing is
not important enough
• For some presses, pointing users to Amazon is
a better practice than D2C

11. Biggest Challenges
• Fulfillment for ebooks
• Getting Web traffic
• Competition from Amazon
• Customer service
• Technological infrastructure

12. Sales Patterns (and Aspirations)
• Most presses had sales in the 1% range
• A small number had sales around 3%
• Direct connection between attention to Web
site traffic and higher sales

13. However,
• We defined “significant level of sales” as 10%
or more of total volume
• Presses’ aspirations and expectations covered
the gamut
• Many said, “Small opportunity”
• About the same number said, “Significant
opportunity”

14. Outlook
• We know D2C can work—because it already
does
• To get to 3%: Best practices
• We don’t yet have the idea to take sales up to
10% of volume, presses’ aspirations
notwithstanding

15. Contact Information
• Joseph J. Esposito
• espositoj@gmail.com
• @josephjesposito