Click here for presentation and video: The new dynamics of Publishing

The publishing industry is evolving at an astoundingly fast pace. Besides going digital, the industry is gradually transitioning from a b2b business model to a b2c model. This is largely due to the changing scenario of retail, distributions sales and marketing, all owing to the recent and widespread popularity of social networking or social media.
– Presented at the O’ Reilly Tools of Change Conference 2010, By Sameer Shariff, Founder and CEO of Impelsys Inc. (iPublishCentral)

Over the past 8 years, we’ve heard countless reasons why e-books just won’t work. We’ve been advised that digital books will only be a niche market. We’ve been cautioned that e-books will spell the death of the industry.

Despite these well-intentioned opinions, we pressed on; building a platform for the masses and believing that this would be the next great chapter in the publishing industry’s proud history.

After last week’s Frankfurt Book Fair, I am proud to announce that the revolution is over and the future is finally here.

For five straight days, my team and I were in back-to-back (to-back) meetings with the world’s leading publishers talking about digital content delivery. We read innumerable stories about the revolution including the WSJ’s “E-books are hot topic at Frankfurt Book Fair” and the AP’s “E-books gain a foothold at Frankfurt Book Fair.” We even saw China play second fiddle to Google, Apple and Amazon.

Since the launch of iPublishCentral at FBF last year, the publishing industry and iPublishCentral have taken some significant steps forward. Over the past 12 months, more than 350 publishers from around the world, including the AMA, MIT Press, F+W Media, M.E. Sharpe, Marshall Cavendish and Vanderbilt University Press, have signed on to use iPublishCentral.

We’ve added support for content in multiple formats, multiple languages and for multiple mobile devices. We’ve increased reporting and analysis tools and have begun supporting various pricing models, including rentals.

What we’re most proud of is that iPublishCentral enables publishers of any size or in any location to make their content for sale online and to promote their brands and titles across the Web in a simple and cost-effective manner, with minimal up front investments and pay-as-you-go pricing.

I wanted to use this blog entry to thank our customers, our partners and the incredible team at iPublishCentral for their hard work and their dedication to this cause. There remains a great deal of work ahead of us, but the future is indeed bright.

Viva la revolution,

Sameer Shariff

Like many of us in the publishing industry, I have been closely monitoring the recent wave of e-book coverage in the consumer media. We have seen powerful headlines such as “B&N Launches Kindle Killer” (Wall Street Journal) and “Is Amazon Taking Over the Book Business” (Time Magazine) and questions abound: Are we nearing Malcolm Gladwell’s proverbial tipping point? Will e-books sales capture a substantial share of the overall market in the next few years? Are Jeff Bezos and Steve Riggio going to rumble? Possibly.

Amazon and Barnes & Noble certainly continue to move the needle by developing new technologies, engaging new partners and driving consumer awareness. But I would like to offer a slightly less “sexy” story angle. Perhaps this isn’t a race for inter-stellar domination between two massive companies. Perhaps the story is not about one viewer or one “e-book megacenter” as the NY Times so eloquently described it. Perhaps this isn’t even about Amazon or B&N or Google, Apple, Sony or whoever comes next.

In my opinion, this is not an “either/or” proposition. This is about how publishers can learn from each other; how we all benefit from technological advancements; and, what we can discover from the new business models that are currently being tested.

Beyond the technology, the alliances and the giant marketing budgets of Amazon and B&N, the key to success for publishers of all sizes is building platforms that connect them with their end-users in meaningful ways. Publishers need to harness that data and produce strong, lasting consumer relationships. The publishers who best understand their consumers and grasp what they really want will lead the way.

The future is bright for the Davids and the Goliaths.

MIT Press

MIT Press has been at the forefront in exploring new models of publishing and here’s one more addition to this list. All MIT Press ebooks available at http://mitpress-ebooks.mit.edu are now available for rent.

Readers who want to check out the MIT Press titles can now do so without having to purchase the book. Subscriptions are available as time-limited rentals, for a week or a month, through which readers can get full access to the content. Access to the books rented out expires after the stipulated time.

This will enable readers from various countries to access MIT Press’ content, for reference or for reading, at a fraction of the cost of the selling price of the book. This will open-up their content to a lot more people and create a micro-payments business model.

Happy reading!

Advances in Custom Publishing at Tools of Change:

The Turnkey Approach:

Another TOC participant, Impelsys, is a New York-based company with a growing reputation of helping publishers establish their online e-book business. The company’s products and platforms are supported by technical resources based in India. It has an impressive client list including Reed Elsevier, McGraw Hill, Wolters Kluwer, Thomson, Springer, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and smaller publishers like Marshall Cavendish, Benchmark Education and Prufrock Press.

CEO Sameer Shariff explained their short term strategy, “We’re helping publishers over-come the current economic downturn by providing a low-cost, self-service, online solution to help publishers monetize, market, distribute and deliver content.”

The company’s iPublishCentral allows publishers to move their content online, while iPublishWidget allows publishers to generate viral marketing around titles. Shariff is optimistic that once the economy recovers somewhat, “publishers will become increasingly sophisticated in developing unique, branded portals through which they can create innovative content and media, sustain relationships… and secure a profitable online presence integrated with more traditional print offerings.” This is a company to watch over the next few years.

Read more at Advances in Custom Publishing at Tools of Change (April 16, 2009) The Seybold Report

I recently read an article on Fortune.com by Michael Copeland titled, ‘The end of paper‘ and was delighted. It just reaffirmed my thoughts in terms of the direction I predict the industry will take. The article sums up just how you may be reading your newspaper or your book on an e-paper device in the near future. A sleek, lightweight, portable e-reader is slowly becoming an attractive alternative to the hardcover tomes. The excitement, for me, is around the rapid pace at which this transformation is taking place.

Several companies, including giants like HP, Fujitsu and startups such as Polymer Vision, FirstPaper and Plastic Logic are developing new versions of e-reader addressing the limitations of the current devices available in the market. The new e-readers feature larger screen, wireless connectivity, longer battery life, and touch screen functionality for easy navigation. In short, the e-reader is all set to take…well…reading to a completely new level.

Not only does it come packed with a host of advantages, the e-Books are a cost-effective, durable way to go. What we can look forward to in the near future is flexible display technology that will allow you to fold your screen small enough to slip into your pocket. Apart from Plastic Logic, other players including HP, LG Display and Polymer Vision are working on developing their own versions.

Though e-book sales are still a small percentage of sales compared to print sales, I believe we are closer to the tipping point than ever before. The signs all indicate that we are going in the right direction. Publishers need to be aware of all these advancements and be ready when e-sales take over from print. They need to experiment and see how best to make their business models work in the electronic world.

On another equally uplifting note, we will have more trees thanks to e-books and perhaps do more than our bit for global warming.

So I’m finally back from a crazy month of conferences and meetings.  Met a lot of interesting publishing people – all facing similar challenges.

We were a gold sponsor of the TOC conference and we saw an incredible response from publishers and people from the industry in general. It just goes to prove that no matter what the market conditions are, publishers know that they must look and invest in technology and electronic offerings to stay current with market trends and how important it is to keep up with the rapidly changing industry. Maybe that’s why the Tools of Change conference was sold out whereas some other traditional meetings saw a significant decline in the number of attendees.  We also exhibited at PSP (Professional and Scholarly Publishing) where the attendance was off significantly from last year.  From what I have been reading, many meetings are struggling for attendance – but not so at TOC.  This gives you a clear indication of the focus in publishing - in this concerned market.

This year, I noticed that one of the most discussed topics at various conferences was “e-books” in its various configurations and forms.  Many of the presentations had lots of numbers and graphs depicting various upticks and trends in ebook sales. In one session on “E-Books: Business Models and Strategies”, gave the following numbers on electronics vs print… “In STM, estimates of digital revenue range from 15-30% of total book revenue; in higher education it’s up to 30%; and in reference it’s 60%.”  We can now see clearly that consumers are changing their reading habits.  Stanza, the new reader for the iPhone, boasted that since offering Stanza in Dec 2008, there have been over 1.5 million downloads of the reader and millions of more books downloaded to their iPhones.

Another hot topic at TOC was Twitter and how it has changed the way information is communicated and exchanged. There were lots of discussions on the Dos and Don’ts of Twitter and the most effective way of messaging and marketing on Twitter. Almost everybody at the TOC was online and twittering throughout the conference. ‘TOC’ was the most twittered topic for almost a week. Marketing on Twitter is a whole new deal. I too am becoming a tweeter on Twitter and I think that if you’re not at least putting your feet in the bird feeder, you’re missing out on a lot of information that could be useful to your future - no matter what area of publishing is your focus.

We were VERY pleased with all the enthusiasm and interest that we saw in iPublishCentral.  At the conference we announced that iPublishCentral registration rose above 150 publishers since launching at the Frankfurt Book Fair and from what I’m seeing – TOC is already helping that number soar.  We held a seminar at TOC: ‘Sparking a new e book revolution through a new self-serve model’ by Sameer Shariff, our CEO. We all attended some very interesting presentations too, and I thoroughly enjoyed sitting in on Tim O’Reilly’s presentation about “reasons to be excited” and Chris Brogan on ‘blogging and social media’. Nick Bilton presented on ‘the future of storytelling’ which was inspiring and Robert Stein’s focus on a publishers new responsibility “… to build and nurture vibrant communities for authors and tend to their readers” was an eye-opener for many publishers. The focus of building a community around your content is one that we have been conveying to market for a long time.

Throughout the conference, certainly there was a focus on how the market conditions are challenging, to say the least, and why it is especially important for publishers to dip their toes in the water and test out the ebook market with a low cost/low risk solution.  So when you think about it, there couldn’t have been a better time to have launched iPublishCentral since it provides low cost and time saving solutions to publishers.  Timing is everything.  Take a dip and tweet the market.

Let me know what you found most interesting at TOC.

Are you following us on Twitter?

We are constantly updating you with the latest news from iPublishCentral at http://twitter.com/ipublishcentral. Our twitter account is where we tweet about all the new publishers and their new publications. We announce the books that they have, discuss them and look forward to your feedback and reviews.

We are also a part of the #booktrade, it is a directory for those in book trade and using twitter. http://www.highspotinc.com/blog/2008/12/a-directory-of-book-trade-people-on-twitter/

iPublishCentral will make an appearance at The Online Information Conference 2008,                    the world’s no. 1 conference for the information industry!

Attracting over 900 delegates from over 40 countries, the conference provides a forum dedicated to learning, debate, professional development, technology reviews and assessments, expert discussion as well as case-study presentations and the sharing of research results and opinion.

The conference, also popular as London Online among the publishing and information industry, is scheduled for December 2-4, at Olympia Grand Hall, Hammersmith, London.

iPublishCentral will be present along with Publishing Technology, our strategic partner for the UK region, at stand no. 620.   A dedicated demo station will be set up at the stand for a live demonstration of iPublishCentral.  Representatives from Impelsys and Publishing Technology will provide detailed information and insights about iPublishCentral and how it helps publishers Market, Distribute, and Deliver Content online, through a very easy self-serve model.

To set up a meeting with us here, please write to: marketing@ipublishcentral.com or register online.

Back in Bangalore after a successful show at Frankfurt, and managed some time to write this blog after sorting out a mountain of emails. 

Frankfurt Book Fair was hectic.  Can’t say enough about the serial meetings, non-stop walk ins, and hundreds of enquiries about our new product - iPublishCentral has created waves, and the team is still reeling under the tremendous response it has got.