Publishing Case Studies and Papers

Paper - From Books to Bytes: How the sale of digital content is changing the way a publishing business functions

Mark Majurey, Digital Development Director, Taylor & Francis Group

Delivered to BIC Supply Chain Meeting, London Book Fair , April 2008

I see I have precisely twenty minutes to describe to you how the rise of digital content has changed the publishing business, so for this session I will focus on some of the changes we at T&F have seen over the last 5 years.

In 2007, T&F’s earnings from digital sales (by which I include ebooks, mp3s and website subscriptions) made up roughly 10% of total global revenue. That represents 45% growth on 2006 figures and we are expecting at least that level of growth in 2008. 2008 is, we’re told, the year the industry has described (not for the first time) as “the year of the ebook”. We read daily of publishing houses distributing Sony Readers to its staff as part of a new workflow for manuscript management – if even our most traditional editorial staff are seizing the initiative for ebook readers, then surely the ebook market really will come to pass in 2008!

At this rate of growth, within 4 to 5 years, revenue from digital content should comprise 50% of total sales. T&F are digitising 80% of our frontlist annually, and at present 95% of our electronic market is with institutional customers, though the sale of ebooks to individuals is also showing signs of rapid growth.

Editorial
There have been some muted changes within the business of editorial and commissioning. As with print books, the workflow begins with editorial staff, but it’s interesting to note that the question of whether to convert any title into an ebook is still assumed to be a ‘no’ unless otherwise specified by the editor.

Perhaps the biggest challenge to publishers has been the commissioning of web content. Editors are of course expected not only to commission the primary work, but also any ancillary content, such as companion websites that now accompany every textbook T&F publishes. Until recently, most companion websites were nothing more than a marketing page with sample chapters and reviews – now the expectation is to deliver complementary and unique material, perhaps modularised into VLE cartridges compatible with university platforms, test banks, rich media, and secure areas for lecturers to upload and download course materials, as well as communicate with each other through blogs and forums. The challenge for the editorial function is to continue to deliver high quality, unique content through ever-advancing new methods. Of course, there is a pressure for this to happen within current resources since the ‘culture of free’ on the internet means that value-added content usually cannot be sold. In the case of textbooks, the digital content, therefore, needs to be fully integrated and referenced to the print product in order to drive the extra sales.
 

Marketing
It is perhaps in Marketing that we have seen a real revolution in what’s possible. In the last two years there has been a very marked shift from traditional direct methods of print promotion to electronic campaigns.

Google Book Search was the first technology to enable marketing teams to reproduce the book browsing experience electronically. T&F embedded the Google Book Search widget into its ecommerce site giving us a low cost method of opening up each book electronically to prospects and customers. Microsoft Live Book Search has recently been launched with improved functionality to allow control and administration of content viewable on a title-by-title basis, which will allow marketing teams to run innovative email campaigns where, for example, the entire book might be viewed for the duration of a campaign before being returned to its limited view later.

T&F also publishes links to its own ebook platforms to allow free viewing of the first 30 pages of every title it publishes.

Perhaps the most recent development in marketing has been the rise of the widget, which previously was something you found in the bottom of a can of Guinness. Interestingly, it is trade publishers who have adopted the widget most enthusiastically. T&F are currently working on implementing a widget system which will encompass all 18,500 ebook titles this year. This not only allows innovative marketing techniques, such as viral marketing and embedding widgets onto author blogs, but similar technology will also allow us to revolutionise the inspection or examination copy model. Sending electronic Inspection Copies through the internet allows us to control the viewing time (usually 45 days) and capture both qualitative feedback (through onscreen annotations) as well as metrics (which pages and chapters were read, and which weren’t) immediately and without accruing the costs and delays of picking, packing, and posting a gratis physical copy of the product. Perhaps the most innovative use of the widget as inspection copy can be seen as the feedback collected comes full circle and we are able to re-use the metrics and feedback collected to incorporate into the product development cycle, adding new content and cutting back on what’s proved to be less relevant content in future editions.

Then there’s the activity we don’t see, such as ONIX feeds to various channels. With digital publishing, it is imperative that you get you product information “out there” on as many platforms, sites and systems as possible. Half of the battle is ensuring your markets receive timely and accurate bibliographic data, with as much of a forward view as possible.

The Marketing workflow has had to respond to these new developments, often shifting campaign activity much earlier in the publishing process and often having to be timed with more traditional marketing campaigns to create a two-pronged approach.

Production
Although on the surface there appear to be new supplier types to manage (such as the rise of the DAD or Digital Asset Distributor) and new products to create – in T&F’s case, ebooks each in 4 different formats for the various readers ¬– in reality the production department has arguably had to change least of all.

If we were to look under the hood, the workflows and processes are variations on what has served production departments well for many years. The biggest change to T&F has been to adopt a true XML-first workflow. This has been managed through the internal development of software called Kudu which automates much of the structuring of author manuscripts into XML. This software (published as freeware) has been rolled out to our typesetters and freelancer copy-editors to use, as well as our own DAD – which incidentally is ValueChain International.

The effect has been to greatly reduce the cost of producing structured content, particularly compared to XML-last workflows.

Inventory management has had more emphasis now since true Print on Demand has been offered, and new internal resource has been created for website development and to manage the gradual shift to structured content before outputting PDFs.
 

Sales
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sales landscape has changed as much as the marketing. With the disaggregation and reaggregation of content came new business models, moving book publishing into areas previously the reserve of journals business. We can now sell books by the chapter (journals have been selling digital copies of articles for years); indeed, we can even sell bespoke customised ebooks to individuals who chose which pages of which titles to compile into a single download – T&F were in fact the very first business to introduce to the world of publishing the ecompile concept some years ago. We can now sell a variety of subscription periods from days to years; we can sell perpetual access to products where the customer receives no physical or electronic asset. Our sales channels have changed, moving from traditional bricks and mortar booksellers to online booksellers to online ebook platforms.

There has also been a noticeable change in customer service expectations. The digital world expects us now to be more responsive, to answer email queries in minutes rather than days, and to provide a global 24/7 service as standard. What was seen as a value-add service previously is now part of the standard offering: an example being the expectation from librarians that publishers provide MARC-21 records customised to their library urls. The continued development of ATHENs and Shibboleth access management systems reinforces the need to provide quick and efficient access to all of our platforms and websites. The timely feed of bibliographic data is almost as important as the product itself – indeed the ONIX standard is already being upgraded in order to cater for the information needs of today’s market. We should hear more about this in Robin’s presentation after the coffee break.

The emergence of a new drop-shipment model of selling ebooks, whereby sales of ebooks are made from online stores which do not hold the content but instead provide a direct ecommerce link (invisible and seamless to the customer) to the publisher’s or DAD’s own platform is further proof of the rapid change we are witnessing within the sales function.

With this shift in selling, we have also seen a shift in resource with our Journals sales force taking on more and more of the books business due to their experience with the libraries market.
The alternative view: from books to books
Clearly the advent of digital content has changed much within the business of publishing, but there is one line of thought that says the changes are incremental only and not really indicative of a publishing revolution.

Despite the continuing changes I’ve discussed, the supply chain for ebooks is already largely established. It will soon become the familiar sausage factory model we all know and love so well.

For those who still think we’re on the cusp of a revolution in publishing, there is a stark warning to us from previous experience. Not so long ago CDs were being hailed as enabling the revolution in publishing. The industry created departments costing millions on the promise of massive returns which never happened. We all made large losses.

Now, ironically, ebooks have become mainstream and successful, but is progress really just an illusion? We have possibly just come full circle since the ebook is still barely any different to the print product. Indeed, many publishers will generate ebooks from the print file. There is minimal added functionality compared to print (search, bookmarking, internal reference linking), but the principles have not changed. The authoring process remains the same, the production processes are similar albeit electronic, and despite providing various slice and dice models (such as the ecompile function on T&F’s ebook platform), we still prefer to consume content in the book format. One might liken the ebook and it’s many formats to products seen in the fmcg world for decades ¬– we can now buy washing detergent in liquid form, as tablets, or as squishy capsules, but the function and use has remained exactly the same as with the original powdered form.

So now publishers are in somewhat of a quandary. Do we stick with ebooks and let others enter the market for digital publishing, or do we invest to position ourselves as first to market for the next big thing? It could be argued that all the last 8 to 10 years has done has been to ease the transmission of books electronically. Other than that it hasn’t taken us any further. It could be said that true digital multimedia publishing has been put on hold as a result of ebooks. The question for the future is whether publishers will invest and step into that gap, or will it be occupied by other industries, such as software developers who have already started to acquire publishing businesses?

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About Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis publishes scholarly information of the highest quality. Building on two centuries’ experience, Taylor & Francis has grown rapidly over the last two decades to become a leading international academic publisher. With offices in London, Brighton, Basingstoke and Abingdon in the UK, New York and Philadelphia in the USA and Singapore and Melbourne in the Pacific Rim, the Taylor & Francis Group publishes more than 1400 journals and around 2000 new books each year, with a books backlist in excess of 40,000 specialist titles.
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