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Case Studies - Taylor and Francis

Background

Academic publisher Taylor & Francis has experienced dramatic growth over the last two decades. This growth has been fuelled both organically and by acquisition of other publishing companies, and through Taylor & Francis’ ability to efficiently and effectively integrate these companies within its operations and market offering. This required Taylor & Francis to adopt a simple approach to integrating publishers and their processes and a quick and consistent way to digitise and integrate content.

Today Taylor & Francis is part of the highly successful Informa Group. It has established itself as one of the top five global academic publishers and one of the leading exponents of digital content.

In 2001 Taylor & Francis identified some 15,500 titles to have value in the digital environment. Its challenge was to establish a strategy that would enable it to digitise these files, while also accommodating 2,000 new titles each year as well as the additional content obtained through acquisition. At the same time it had to leverage these digital works and investment to make additional revenues.

Taylor & Francis recognised it needed to outsource its digital operation and selected Value Chain International (VCIL) as its digital partner.

Business Solution
Conversion
In 2001 Taylor & Francis started an aggressive digital conversion program which saw 1000 titles digitised in the first year. All the titles were converted into DX XML which enabled them to be rendered automatically into multiple ebook formats. This digital format neutrality gave Taylor & Francis the ability to respond to any emerging new formats literally at a flick of a switch, thus future proofing its digital investment. Today the program has converted over 18,000 titles to give Taylor & Francis one of the world’s largest digitised offers. VCIL continues to convert around 1500 titles every year.

Distribution
Taylor & Francis adopted VCIL’s platform to create client, subject and general ebookstores. It also adopted VCIL’s DX Reader to provide a secure online reader which supported its elibrary offering. VCIL has created and hosted some 180 ebookstores and elibraries for Taylor & Francis. VCIL also distributes the digitised titles to third party aggregators to sell on behalf of Taylor & Francis. The combination of a large collection of titles and an effective sales channel has made Taylor & Francis one of the most successful publishers in the digital arena.

Taylor & Francis also recently chose VCIL’s DXReader to underpin the Informaworld online platform to support all book titles across the group. It has also adopted VCIL’s Digital Drop Ship model to provide effective digital distribution whilst maintaining full control of its digital assets.
To add extra value to the program, VCIL has developed a subscription model encyclopaedia platform and a new access control and administration management system to handle user access to all online platforms. This management system seamlessly supports audio content, thus adding value to the Taylor & Francis ebookstore by providing a more comprehensive customer experience.

“The strategy we adopted has enabled us to now offer one of the most comprehensive digital collections and make it available through all the appropriate digital channels. Whichever way the market evolves Taylor & Francis is now able to not only respond at speed but also offer both quality content and supporting digital marketing materials. The relationship we have with VCIL has been and continues to be pivotal to the digital development of our collection and leveraging its value in the market.” Christoph Chesher, Group Sales Director, Taylor & Francis Group.

Approach
Taylor & Francis and VCIL have forged a strong business relationship over seven years which has enabled Taylor & Francis to focus on its growth, sales, and publishing while developing a comprehensive digital portfolio.

As Taylor & Francis moved into other digital areas it was able to use the skills and relationships it had developed with VCIL, enabling it to deploy digital programs quickly, and importantly have the confidence that the solution will be delivered on time, to quality and meet the business needs.

“We first contracted VCIL in September 2000, and have recently renewed our contract for production and online support, based upon their performance. We are very pleased with the work that VCIL has undertaken for us to date. We find VCIL most suitable for our organization's needs in the area of content solutions and services.” Roger Horton, CEO, Taylor & Francis Group

Benefits
With 20,000 titles available in eight different digitized formats, the Taylor & Francis ebookstore repository is the largest in the world.

The ebookstore provides a unique customer service in providing not only sales of individual titles, but also offers micro-purchases where chapters, or even a few pages, can be purchased.

The increased utility and customer value from digital delivery has provided extra pricing power and market penetration. Digital archives, data services and daily information provision have all contributed to good growth, which has been further enhanced by cross leveraging event brands and publishing PI intellectual property.

Taylor & Francis generates a growing and significant percentage of its book revenues from its digital titles. Today the percentage achieved is an exceptional result and is far ahead of its publishing competitors and the market.

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.
www.taylorandfrancis.com

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