Está en la página 1de 36

FA_Frankfurt Fair Dealer Cover Wrap.

indd 1 8/2/12 9:12 AM


An in-depth look at everything digital at the fair
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
FRANKFURT BOOK FAIR 2012
FA_Frankfurt Fair Dealer Cover Wrap.indd 2 8/2/12 9:12 AM
1
www.publishersweekly.com
T
he Frankfurt Book Fair has been steadily increasing the
digital presence at its annual event and at the 2012 fair,
digital will be more evident than ever with the latest
gadgets, hot topics, and new perspectives scattered
through the halls. For its two most accessible digital
programsFrankfurt Hot Spots and Frankfurt Sparksfair-
goers dont even have to leave the show oor to check things
out and participate in the conversation. Frankfurt Hot Spots
are the fairs plug & play multimedia stands, meeting areas,
and live presentation platforms. Described as nodes of inno-
vation, there are six throughout the exhibit halls, each focus-
ing on a different sector of the publishing business.
Now in its fourth year, the popular Frankfurt Sparks pro-
gram is back with stages in hall 4.2 (STM, Academic Pub-
lishing & Specialist Information) and hall 8.0 (English-
Speaking World). The events are centrally located and feature
interviews and discussions with industry players on the latest
trends and developments in publishing.
Frankfurt Dives Into Digital
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
BY ANDREW RICHARD ALBANESE
THE HOT SPOTS
Here are the Hot Spots at this years fair,
with themes and locations listed below
(see the map for exact locations):
Hot Spot: Digital Innovation
Location: Hall 8.0
Exhibitors and presenters at the Hot Spot Digital
Innovation focus on a range of forward-looking
subjects, including software products, data con-
version, database structuring and maintenance,
and startups and other players in digital publishing.
Hot Spot: Education
Location: Hall 4.2
The Hot Spot Education features subjects like
innovative teaching and learning aids, games, digi-
tal whiteboards, education software and e-learn-
ing solutions, and solutions and strategies for
schools, universities, and other community plat-
forms.
Hot Spot: Kids & E-reading
Location: Hall 3.0
The Hot Spot Kids focuses on whats winning
hearts in one of the most demanding and dynamic
target groups worldwide: kids, youngsters, and
those who are young at heart. It features suppli-
ers of digital stories, illustrations, audio, comics,
and animation, as well as providers of e-books,
enriched books, e-bookstores, virtual communi-
ties, self-publishing and social media platforms,
enriched books and apps, and other digital
media projects.
Hot Spot: Mobile
Location: Hall 6.1
The Hot Spot Mobile showcases developments
in tablets, e-readers, and apps, network providers
DIGITAL
HOTSPOTS
ON THE
FRANKFURT
FAIRGROUND
2
www.publishersweekly.com
and content licensors; providers of mobile con-
tent, app developers, device manufacturers and
developers; and software and other providers for
everything from mobile payment platforms to
mobile marketing, and accessories for e-readers,
smartphones, and netbooks.
Hot Spot: Professional & Scientic
Information
Location: Hall 4.2
The Hot Spot Professional & Scientic Informa-
tion provides a platform to content and service
providers in the elds of specialist information,
academic resources, and libraries. It features a
range of aggregators and agents of digital con-
tent; service providers for scientific publishing
and libraries; as well as suppliers and develop-
ers of document management systems.
Hot Spot: Publishing Services
Location: Hall 4.0
The Hot Spot Publishing Services focuses on both
print and digital service providers and innovative,
customizable products in all phases of content
production and distributionfrom A for asset
management to Z for zero warehousing. It fea-
tures content management service providers,
digital distributors and aggregators, providers of
software, including DRM, data conversion, data-
base maintenance, editing, and e-marketing.
FRANKFURT SPARKS
A sampling of the Sparks schedule fol-
lows, subject to change (check the of-
cial Frankfurt program for the latest
information).
Wednesday, October 10
99:30
Data Insights with Bowker
Location: Hall 8.0, N988
9:4510:45
Lessons Learned from Digital
Publishing
CEOs from distinguished publishers and some of
the most innovative industry minds share their
experiences and insights.
Chair, the U.K. Publishing Association chief
executive, Richard Mollet; speakers: Richard
Charkin, executive director at Bloomsbury Pub-
lishing; Matt Hanbury, CEO at Murdoch Books;
and George Lossius, CEO at Publishing Technol-
ogy.
Location: Sparks Stage Hall 4.2, B400
10:3011
Maximizing Customer Value via
Predictive Analysis
Clay Stobaugh, senior v-p, corporate marketing,
John Wiley & Sons, in conversation with Mark
Dressler
Location: Hall 8.0, N988
1111:30
Hello, Reader! How Independent
Literary Publishers Are Successfully
Reaching Their Audiences
Americas independent literary publishers are
thriving. Learn why at this panel discussion featur-
ing Anna Moschavakis of Ugly Duckling Presse
and Johnny Temple of Akashic Books. Moderated
by Jeffrey Lependorf, Council of Literary Maga-
zines and Presses
Location: Hall 8.0, N988
1112
Successful Partnerships in Educa-
tional and Academic Publishing in
MENA
Speakers include publishers from international
companies and their Arab counterparts sharing
insights about their successful business in the
Middle East and North Africa region.
Sponsored by the Abu Dhabi International
Book Fair by Kitab and the Abu Dhabi Tourism and
Culture Authority
Location: Sparks Stage Hall 4.2, B400
11:3012
Community Building: How to
Identify, Reach, and Keep Your
Audience in the Digital Marketplace
Rebecca Smart, managing dir. Osprey Group, and
Amanda Rutter, editor, Strange Chemistry imprint
in conversation with Mark Dressler
Location: Hall 8.0, N988
15-15:30
Todays Licensing Nuance, Partner-
ships and Investment
Kris Kliemann, v-p, global rights, John Wiley &
Sons, in conversation with Mark Dressler
Location: Hall 8.0, N988
15:30-16
Digital Licensing: The New Primary
Rights for Growing Your Audience
David Bowers, v-p, business development,
Oxford University Press, in conversation with
Mark Dressler
Location: Hall 8.0, N988
1616:30
The Changing Role of International
Sales
Mark Streatfeild, international sales director,
Hachette UK, in conversation with Mark Dressler
Location: Hall 8.0, N988
Thursday, October 11
10:3011
The 4 Ps of the Digital Marketplace
for Illustrated Nonction Content
Venetia Davie, v-p, new business development, Par-
ragon Books, in conversation with Mark Dressler
Location: Hall 8.0, N988
1111:30
New Zealand Editors Buzz Panel
Four of New Zealands top editors will share their
passion about books, moderated by Kevin Chap-
man, managing director and publisher at Hachette
New Zealand, and president of the Publishers
Association of New Zealand.
Location: Hall 8.0, N988
1212:30
Debut Breakout in an Era of Self
Publishing
Jamie Byng, publisher, Canongate Books, in con-
versation with Mark Dressler
Location: Hall 8.0, N988
12:3013
Story-making for a Transmedia World
Jan Bozarth, author and creator, the Fairy God-
mother Academy series, in conversation with
Mark Dressler
Location: Hall 8.0, N988
1414:30
Commissioning Straight into Digital:
Creative and Business Opportunities
When Print Is Not in the Picture
Dan Franklin, digital publisher, Random House
UK, in conversation with Mark Dressler
Location: Hall 8.0, N988
15:3016
Recent GAMA Moves and What They
Mean for the Future of Publishing
Casper Grathwohl, v-p, group strategy, Oxford
University Press, in conversation with Mark
Dressler
Location: Hall 8.0, N988
Friday, October 12
13:3014
The Oxford Index Discovery Gate-
way: Lessons in Experimentation
Robert Faber, editorial director, reference, and
director, Discoverability Program, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, in conversation with Mark Dressler
Location: Hall 8.0, N988
14:3015
BookMachine: For People Who Make
Publishing Happen
Laura Austin, cofounder, BookMachine, in conver-
sation with Mark Dressler
Location: Hall 8.0, N988
1515:30
Small Demons and the New Seren-
dipity: How to Really Go Wherever
the Story Takes You
Valla Valkili and Richard Nash, Small Demons, in
conversation with Mark Dressler
Location: Hall 8.0, N988
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
Relief from Publishing Stress
cP
Title Management
MANUSCRIPT TO MARKET
Relief from Publishing Stress
Prescriptions Available at Stand M988
U.S. +1 610-940-1700;
UK +44 (0)1865 261437; Spain +34-607 261 801
www.codeMantra.com info@codeMantra.com
4
www.publishersweekly.com
I
n essence, the digital publishing industry is powered by XML,
PDF, EPub, and HTML, and from these four rises the game-
changing digital-era product: the e-book. Whether it is a simple
compilation of PDFs or an XML-rst title in EPub 3 or HTML5
format enhanced with interactive and audio and/or video ele-
ments, the e-book (and its potential revenue) is on the top of every
publishers agenda.
(Near) Future Dynamics
The most interesting aspect of the e-book market, says CEO Dev
Ganesan of Aptara, is that it is both maturing and emerging at the
same time. Publishers scrambling to get their content into EPub are
being confronted with formatting and distribution issues, while
emerging technologies such as HTML5 will ultimately force these
same publishers to rethink their entire content strategy." Ganesan
goes on to point that current device capabilities "necessitate new
ideas and production approaches to deliver compelling content. So,"
he says, "publishers need a new content strategyfrom concept to
development to designthat allows them to create, combine, recom-
bine, and serve information assets in new ways. This exible digital-
rst approach is what we at Aptara refer to as agile publishing.
With consumers now accessing information very differently than
before, smartphones, e-readers, and tablets present publishers with
opportunities for creating new mobile products and generating new
revenue streams, from both new and existing customers, adds Gane-
san, who is intrigued to nd that 60% of e-book publishers in Apta-
ras 2012 e-book publishing survey still employ a legacy print-based
production workow.
Over at Datamatics Global Services, the momentum for e-books
and digital-first solutions has continued unabated. Says Krishna
Tewari, global head for digital publishing and retail solutions, The
demand for enhanced interactive support and EPub 3based deliver-
ables has increased now that many devices cater to these specica-
tions. EPub 3s HTML5 support has certainly been pivotal in this
trend shift. Publishers, he adds, have started adopting HTML5 for
their online content and are working to convert existing Flash-based
content into HTML5. They are also looking for support and advice
on technology and workow solutions, especially on agile software
development methodology, which is what Datamatics offers.
Tewari nds that Amazons new tablets offer better capabilities
even as other tablet manufacturers continue to enhance their devices
functionality. These improved devices will help to push content digiti-
zation further and faster, and we hope to see Microsoft Surface join-
ing this movement soon. The Mumbai-based company, with 60%
revenue growth over the previous year, is seeing more academic,
STM, and special-interest content being converted into e-books.
There has been a lot of buzz on big data, semantic enrichment, and
easier content monetization, ensuring more innovation and new ser-
vices in these areas.
Changing Models and Formats
As revenues from digital content in multiple formats such as e-books
(EPub and Kindle) and interactive assets have increased across the
board, open standards for e-books and animated contentDITA,
EPub 3, and HTML5 (with CSS3 and JavaScript), for instanceare
coming in a big way but have not yet matured, says John Prabhu, v-p,
solutions architect, at SPi Global. The online and cloud-based con-
tent authoring platform has evolved successfully, with the service
provided free to authors and aggregators to publish and distribute
content. However, since each device, whether it is iPad, Kindle, or
Android OS, still comes in different models, screen sizes, and user
functionalities, achieving consistency in content rendering remains a
big challenge.
For now, software vendors and publishers are trying different busi-
ness models to tap e-revenues. Adds Prabhu, We have heard Jeff
Bezos stating that people want services, not gadgets, and that Kin-
dle Fire is a service, and read about Penguin acquiring self-publishing
company Author Solutions. Increasingly, clients are demanding that
vendors propose a technology-based content solution instead of just
getting the content processed. This means that content vendors need
to have a deep knowledge of and expertise in the publishing domain
and technology in order to make signicant change at the client end.
With Amazon now embracing EPub, a surge in e-book sales is to be
expected, says Mumbai-based Nizam Ahmed, founder and CEO of
DiTech Process Solutions. Kindle will have full capacity to read
EPub les, thus pushing it further as the preferred e-book format. And
with Safari, and soon iPad, supporting MathML, the industry is set to
see a jump in sales of technical and scientic e-books, he predicts.
The pressure on publishers, he adds, is to retain their competitive edge
through enhanced e-books. There is a heightened interest in just-in-
time, alternative, and nonformal educational venues such as online
learning, online mentoring, and online independent study. In all of
these, time-to-market has emerged as a critical element, requiring
publishers to astutely leverage technology to create and publish con-
tent in the fastest way possible.
Money (and Cost) Talk
Maturity levels of e-book development and online product offerings
are different in the U.S., Europe, and India, notes Qbend COO
Kaushik Sampath. But regardless of their country of origin, all pub-
lishers want to grow their e-books and digital products, and are look-
ing for simpler ways to achieve both cost and work efciencies, notes
Sampath. They also want to have a unied sales process for their print
and digital products. While trade publishers have driven e-book sales
up till now, publishers from all book segments are more open than ever
to experimenting with different business models to monetize their con-
tent, Sampath says.
Over in Chennai, Swift Prosys is digitizing more illustrated and
complex titles, which are signicantly more challenging than convert-
ing textbooks, where much of the process can be automated using
off-the-shelf software, says director for technical and business devel-
opment Mohan Thas Shanmugam, adding that the xed-layout EPub
format has gained popularity in recent months. In general, publish-
ers are eager to convert their backlist and monetize the revived titles.
With e-books, publishers can now circumvent warehousing costs by
storing the e-les on DVDs or computer servers. So whats not to like
about e-books?
On the following pages are highlights of what some companies in
the digital space are doing at Frankfurt.
The Digital Drivers
This years Frankfurt Book Fair features a host of companies
who are helping publishers turn p-books into e-books
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
BY TERI TAN
6
www.publishersweekly.com
Aptara
For Aptara, agile publishing is a new way to look at content strategy.
It encourages publishers to rethink the concept of a book and intro-
duces the concept of valuable content assets. By uncoupling book
content and dividing it into stand-alone assets, a publisher can be
much more nimble, or agile, when it comes to delivering content to
any device or platform, says CEO Dev Ganesan, pointing out that
agile publishing starts way upstream with an initial content strategy,
and when done correctly, the variety of outputs are the easy part.
If we look at a simple cookbook, for instance, the content assets
are the recipes. Each recipe is a stand-alone content unit that can be
searched, sorted, combined, and recombined into a variety of outputs
and products, says Ganesan. You can sort on fat content, produce a
list of recipes that contain less than 5 grams of fat per serving, or pro-
duce a low-fat cookbook. The same recipe assets can be made avail-
able on the Web in a print-on-demand model, or made available as an
app, at a cost, on a wide variety of smartphones and tablets. By
transforming the same content into HTML5, publishers can reach
into a digital asset management system and include audio or video for
devices that support it, while at the same time replacing the assets
with black-and-white high-resolution images for other devices, he
adds. With agile publishing, a single-source le can be converted on
the y to meet the needs of each specic format or device.
Aptaras partnership with San Franciscobased Inkling exem-
plies reimagining the book. Campbell Biology (Pearson Educa-
tion), for instance, has its content enlivened by interactive images,
3-D molecules, videos, animation, and assessments. The engaged
reader browsing its pages likely does not stop to think about the
literally hundreds of content architects, UI (user interface) design-
ers, programmers, and proofreaders who worked to make the
experience possible. Says Ganesan, Inkling and Aptara have been
reinventing the book by developing processes, workows, and
production capacity that efciently repurpose publishers content
into interactive and captivating e-books. Our experience in
instructional and digital design frees up Inkling to focus on mar-
keting and innovation.
To understand more about enhanced e-books, agile publishing,
and other Aptara products, drop by stand F938 in Hall 8.0, or attend
Aptaras Fragile to Agile: Mastering the New Publishing Paradigm
presentation, October 12 at 12:30 p.m. in Hall 4.0s Hot Spot Pub-
lishing Services.
codeMantra
Promoting its integrated and comprehensive publishing workow is
codeMantras main agenda at Frankfurt. Manuscript-to-market, as
we like to put it, is the ability to take a project from its manuscript
stage through edito-
rial revision, prepress,
composition, and digi-
tal conversion to dis-
tribution, says exec-
utive director of publishing services Walter Walker, whose company is
headquartered near Philadelphia. Essentially, this means delivering
all outputs via a single workow phased through collectionPoint [cP],
our cloud-based digital asset management and le server platform.
With cP, clients works on a exible, open architecture that allows easy
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
WHAT WILL EDUCATORS
DO WITH YOUR CONTENT?
The AcademicPub
TM
Content library currently houses over 5 million pieces of content from over 150 publishers.
Partner with AcademicPub today and give educators and institutions access to your content tomorrow.
www.AcademicPub.com
Connect With Us
/academicpub
@academicpub
Search for AcademicPub
Michael Cairns, Chief Revenue Offcer, AcademicPub
Hall 8.0, booth # R928
mcairns@sharedbook.com
(908) 938-4889 USA
@PERSONANONDATA
Accelerate your eBook Business
with your own branded eStore
powered by Qbend
Todays Presentation
Hot Spot - Professional and Scientifc
Information (Hall 4.2, P457)
10
OCT
10:15
www.qbend.com
eBook and Print Book Sales
Online Reading
Multi-channel Publishing
Custom Publishing
Consumer Analytics
HALL
STAND
4.2
N443
WAlk-In fOR lIve deMO
yOuR eSTORe BuIlT And MAInTAIned fRee Of COST
8
www.publishersweekly.com
integration with complementary systems, tools, and enhancements.
Walker will also promote the companys expanded capabilities in
metadata management via cPMetalogic, its ONIX-based application.
This tool offers an intuitive interface for editing ONIX les and can
accommodate unstructured Excel metadata input by transforming it
to ONIX output, says Walker. Also at Frankfurt is cPTitle Manage-
ment, which takes a metadata-level approach to managing all phases
of title development, rights management, marketing, and sales. An
announcement concerning codeMantras enhanced and wide-rang-
ing distribution possibilities is imminent.
Daily demonstrations of its products and services will be held in a
small theater at codeMantras stand, M988, in Hall 8.0. Says Walker,
There will be live presentations of cP 3.0 focusing on its capabilities.
We have also equipped our stand with interactive demo stations pop-
ulated with the latest devices where publishers can view and interact
with examples of our latest le conversions and digital outputs.
To Walker, it is clear that the device landscape is shifting to tablets,
and within the tablet universe, the iPad is not going to be the only con-
tender: The emergence of Kindle and Nook as viable tablet devices
opens up the market, while creating complications. Enabling EPub
and PRC les for media query against an ever-expanding range of
devicese-ink, tablets, and reading apps optimized for iPad,
Android, Macintosh, and PCpresents some challenges. As pub-
lishers start to embrace EPub 3, he adds, some difcult choices have to
be made. To make things even more interesting, Amazon, B&N, and
Apple are looking to distinguish their respective devices with unique
capabilities for page delity reproduction. Not surprisingly, we are
seeing the reemergence of the PDFand in codeMantras case, our
universalPDF solutionwith a searchable text layer. This, of course,
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
prompts one to ask what will become of the industrys ambition for a
single EPub standard.
Datamatics Global Services
The drive to support end-to-end digital publishing life cycle has seen
Datamatics offering an array of new products in the past 18 months,
such as a copyediting engine, intelligent XML tagging services,
semantic enrichment products, e-books in all formats, and a content
billing solution. One product being unveiled at Frankfurt is i-DPUB, a
PDFtoe-book conversion engine that combines multiple technolo-
gies, including Framework 4.0, .NET Framework, Java, and Adobe
SDK. This engine converts PDF les directly into EPub format, pro-
viding clients with signicant cost savings.
For organizations with huge repositories of audio and video con-
tent in native formats, we offer multimedia content conversion that
uses intelligent voice-recognition technology in conjunction with
existing data manipulation and tagging engines. It has the ability to
carry out autocapturing of content and metadata, and is also avail-
able for review at Frankfurt, says Krishna Tewari, Datamatics
global head for digital publishing and retail solutions. The company
has recently partnered with Paris-based TEMIS and Berlin-based
PAUX Technologies on content enrichment.
Content monetization is the goal of everything a publisher does,
Tewari says. Understanding the critical areas of this requirement has
led us to develop Content Billing Solution to provide functionality to
publishers to bill even on a per-word basis. Overall, this solution pro-
vides various options for better content monetization.
More e-book solutions are also on the way as Datamatics looks
into digitizing and converting more than 20 million pages this year.
Meanwhile, Tewari and his team are involved in proof-of-concept
(POC) discussions for audio-to-XML conversion with a major Euro-
pean organization. This POC entails moving millions of voice
recordings to XML, which will then be released to the public for
download through our Content Billing Solution, Tewari says. The
team is also working on embedding JavaScript to provide interactive
q&a sessions within a book and facilitate submission of answers to
online CMS (content management system) for evaluation.
Special demonstration sessions, presentations, and q&a sessions
on the above products and more are being held at stand E1320 in Hall
4.0. The sessions run every hour, starting at 10 a.m., with subject mat-
ter experts from various Datamatics ofces on hand to offer informa-
tion and further insight.
DiTech Process Solutions
Enabling publishers to make the transition to a digital-rst workow
is DiTechs top priority. Given the rapid changes in content consump-
tion behaviors and the critical need for shorter time-to-market, we
have been busy partnering with publishers to expand their EPub-
based products to support areas such as new media, global content,
and HTML5, says founder and CEO Nizam Ahmed.
The functionality offered by most handheld devices means that
todays content needs
to be delivered as
immersive experi-
ences combining vari-
ous aspects: the visual
impact of print, exi-
10
www.publishersweekly.com
Easypress Technologies
Cloud-based publishing is quickly being recognized, studied, and
implemented by publishers, says CEO James Macfarlane of U.K.-based
Easypress Technologies, whose own cloud-based system, aptly named
Book Publishing in the Cloud, promises 50% cost savings and 50%
faster production with a 33% increase in frontlist publishing. The edi-
torial process, often encompassing personnel such as proofreaders and
editors who are based off-site, is dynamic and vital to a successful print
or digital work-
ow. Our cloud-
based solution
enhances the edi-
torial process by
enabling each
member of the
team to work from a remote location while tracking every amendment,
comment, or suggestion. When required, our system can dynamically
produce a complete audit trail of changes made to a book, or physically
produce a comparison of changes made throughout the editorial pro-
cess, Macfarlane says.
Book Publishing in the Cloud, he adds, is a way toward shorter
editorial and production cycles for print books of any size, as well as
immediate creation of electronic outputs such as EPub [in xed and
reowable layout formats], AZW, and KF8, plus various XML a-
vors. These digital outputs have 100% text accuracy. Easypress will
also be demonstrating at Frankfurt its automated xed-layout soft-
ware that generates xed-layout EPub and KF8 les directly from
InDesign within minutes. A half-hour presentation, XML Last: The
New Revolution in Book Publishing, about Easypresss cloud-based
publishing system is scheduled for October 10, 1:45 p.m., and will be
repeated October 11, 9:30 a.m., at Hot Spot Publishing Services in
Hall 4.0, stand A1300.
For Macfarlane, one of the big industry changes in recent months is
publishers movement to insource digital content production and
take charge of their content. As e-book sales begin to represent 20%
or more of a publishing companys revenue, taking ownership of
e-book creation is even more important. Production teams now have
a more technical understanding of the benets of typesetting and pre-
paring book les for output to any print or digital format. We have
seen through the e-book sales of the Fifty Shades trilogy, the real
power of e-bookstheir immediacy, portability, convenience, and
even their anonymity. With new devices and better technologies,
e-book consumers are truly reading what they want whenever, wher-
ever, and however they want it.
Macfarlane and his team are at stand A1312 in Hall 4.0, where
demos, showcases, and assistance on Easypress products and services
will be provided.
Impelsys
It has been four years since Impelsys launched iPublishCentral at the
2008 Frankfurt Book Fair. We have been constantly innovating and
adding to its existing suite of solutions ever since, often taking into
consideration new technologies and changing consumer demands.
This year, we will showcase iPublishCentrals new innovative features
and upcoming releases that will help and empower publishers across
the world in their digital publishing initiatives, says CEO Sameer
Shariff, adding that
visitors to the Impel-
sys stands (L988 in
Hall 8.0 and P440 in
Hall 4.2) will also get
to hear success sto-
ries of publishers
who have chosen
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
bility in layout, the immediacy of touch-based interaction, and the
engagement of interactive elements such as video, audio, animated
infographics, and 360-degree views. We are doing these and more with
our publishing partners, adds Ahmed, whose team is in the process of
developing a unique e-book and e-journal delivery platform to serve a
niche market segment. We have already started acquiring content
from different publishers and will soon be able to launch this portal.
His team recently handled one project where an end-to-end plat-
form was created to enable the publishing client to create, edit, and
store its content, and automatically push the content into different
devices, including the iPad and Android-based tablets. Says Ahmed,
The whole platform and content are tagged according to the pub-
lishers specication. We then dened different templatesfrom print
layout to Web- and tablet-friendly formatsfor different book series
with both simple and very complex designs, and added extensions to
XML style sheets. Our team also took on XML conversion from PDF
and InDesign les, while adding slide shows and exercise classica-
tion, touching up media les, and integrating the whole package into
a user-friendly platform.
At Frankfurt, DiTech is showcasing its latest e-book samples that
incorporate the most up-to-date features of EPub 3 and HTML5,
including enriched content (audio, video, media overlays, and
speech), support for complex content (MathML and complex text-
books), global language support, and new functionalities (semantic
inection, content switching, navigation, scripting, and triggers).
We will show these e-books on three of the most popular tablets in
the market: iPad, Kindle, and Nook, says Ahmed. Specialized
e-book samples for the STM, educational/k12, childrens, and gen-
eral trade publishing segments will also be shown on these tablets at
DiTechs booth, B1345 in Hall 4.0.
12
www.publishersweekly.com
iPublishCentral as their e-book delivery platform.
One of these success stories is F+W Media, the biggest trade name
on iPublishCentrals client list. We have helped them to launch cus-
tomized e-book portals in eight of its leading content areas, thus cre-
ating a family of unique online clubs for e-books. These portals
enable end users to access all e-books read by their community mem-
bers through a subscription-based model.
With the changes in publishing, publishers now nd it difcult to
leverage their digital marketing strategies to promote content, says
Shariff. They need a robust digital marketing strategyan amalga-
mation of tools and knowledgethat enables them to make their
content discoverable online. Through iPublishCentral, they have the
right tools, such as iPublishWidgets and ViewInside, to empower
their content. Impelsys also has a team of digital marketing profes-
sionals whose main task is to assist in viral marketing and e-book rev-
enue generation.
Major publishers catering to a large audience of readers and insti-
tutions such as Elsevier, McGraw-Hill, Cambridge University Press,
Wolters Kluwer, and Thieme have used iPublishCentral. These orga-
nizations need to make their content available across multiple devices,
and we supply them with seamless content delivery through our plat-
form. We offer various business models such as book collections,
print and e-book bundles, institutional sales, retail sales, rentals,
chapter sales, book clubs, subscriptions, lending and scratch-off
codes. So now publishers have the exibility to create multiple e-book
buying options and streams for maximizing revenues, says Shariff.
For more insights on generating e-book revenues, head over to Hall
4.2s Hot Spot Professional and Scientic Information (P457) at 9:30
a.m. on October 10 for executive v-p Gary Rodriguess presentation,
Monetizing Your E-books: Direct-to-Consumer Strategy.
eBook
Conversion Services
::low cost yet high quality::
FROM BACKLIST
CCN1AC1 ICk UC1L
A N k C INDIA
1 I
Our state-of-art tools and processes can convert any type of
materials like paperback, Images, PDF, InDesign, MS-Word /
RTF books to any eBook format like ePUB, Mobipocket, PRC
L
eBook in a comfortable format.
OCR & XHTML
The scanned images / Image PDFs will undergo OCR using
CC8 L A88?? l
OmniPage. The outcome text quality will be more than 99.6%
accuracy. Proofreaders will do manual proofread word by
word to get 100% text quality. The text is converted to XHTML
1 1

Photoshop.
kML C S
w xML
u8 1l u18 NlM45 O 8 MML PM
NLM MML PkMl5 u c
MOu5 M15 4L1O
an ISO 9001:2008 Company
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
Innodata
With multiplatform/multidevice content expected to be the market
focus in the next year or so, it is no wonder that Innodata is busy pro-
moting its capabilities in three separate areas: dynamic and media-
rich content, tablet and mobile strategy development, and e-book dis-
tribution. Recent publishing-related projects that showcase the New
Jerseybased companys wide-ranging capabilities include customiz-
ing e-books by taking print-based content and transforming it into
new, highly protable digital products; developing advanced research
tools to offer precision search results way beyond broad-based Inter-
net search options; and creating interactive content development as
well as dynamic consumer-focused travel content.
We are see-
ing content and
software com-
i ng t oget her
more often. We are also seeing rising user demand to experience con-
tent in a similar way across devices, especially from professionals who
might read online in the ofce and then on a tablet or smartphone
when commuting or when they are at home, says Marc Rubner, v-p
for product marketing, pointing out that this means that we need to
think again about how we develop and render content for readers.
Rapid digital adoption, he adds, is driving publishers to become
digital-rst organizations. Publishers will work over the next year
and a half to transform their organizations and eliminate multiple
workows because it will become increasingly less feasible to main-
tain different workows, say, one for print and another for digital
products. Rubner lists early XML workow, content proling, and
agile content development as the three keys to becoming a digital-rst
organization.
Helping clients to develop more digital products faster and directly
engage customers, and to do both at the lowest cost possible, is Inno-
datas aim, says Rubner. We are anchored by a deep domain exper-
tise in publishing and content life cycle. We deliver technology ser-
vices, consulting, and content enrichment capabilities to drive new
products, channels, and revenues for publishers. Now, with an
expanded tool set that includes the latest platform-based innovations,
Innodata is set to help publishers produce dynamic, media-rich con-
tent at a remarkable pace.
Three half-hour presentations, held on different days at Frankfurt,
are on the schedule: Developing a Winning Tablet and Mobile Strat-
egy, October 10 at 4 p.m. at Hot Spot Mobile (C973) in Hall 6.1;
Tools for Creating and Distributing Dynamic Content, October 11
at 1 p.m. at Hot Spot Digital Innovation (L973) in Hall 8.0; and
Maintaining Protability Among 20+ E-book Platforms, October
12 at 11 a.m. at stand A1300 in Hall 4.0. More information is also
available from Innodata stand H959 in Hall 8.0.
MPS Limited
Automated composition, says CMO Rahul Arora, is the future of
content services, but it may not be viable for design-oriented books.
However, standardization of layouts to minimal parameters will help
in achieving higher automation. Publishers are now looking at con-
tent as structured data residing in a digital core, aka the content man-
agement system [CMS]. So what used to be a linear production work-
ow is now a platform-based workow that allows for simultaneous
multiple-user participation.
Not surprisingly, MPSs newly launched cloud-based DigiCore
platform has the above attributes.
It streamlines, automates, and
optimizes the publishing process
while allowing different stake-
holders to collaborate on the con-
Open Access Solutions from CCC
As a publisher, supporting Open Access (OA)
can be challenging.
Copyright Clearance Center can help.
Join publishers already using CCCs RightsLink to:
Provide authors with a convenient, web-based OA fee administration solution
Promote access to OA journal content and adherence to OA policies
Offer customized licensing and purchase options at the publisher, journal or article level
Capture valuable data about the reuse of their OA articles
Visit our booth Hall 4.2, Stand F410 to start crafting your OA solution.
Where:
Hall 4.2, Professional
and Scientifc
Information Hotspot
When:
11 October, 9:15-10:45
Rights. Content. Solutions.
Please Join Us for Executive Discussions on
Open Access with guest Darren Gillgrass, Managing Director: Custom
Publishing, Informa Healthcare and
Copyright Compliant Content Delivery with guest Jayne Marks,
Vice President of Publishing, Wolters Kluwer Health
www.copyright.com/frankfurt
14
www.publishersweekly.com
tent in a workow-driven manner. Built on advanced business pro-
cess and document management systems, it has six major modules:
DigiEdit, DigiComp, DigiCon, DigiEnrich, DigiReady, and DigiTrak.
DigiEnrich, for instance, adds audio and/or video components,
Web links, and various interactive elements such as quizzes and tests.
It recreates the traditional reading experience with ippable pages
and enhances them with zoom-in, search, and note features. Educa-
tional publishers offering supplementary or long-distance digital
learning materials can use these interactive books as online modules,
CDs or DVDs, whiteboard content, and sharable content object refer-
ence model [SCORM] packages. It is buffed up with a tightly pro-
tected digital rights management system and additional security fea-
tures. As for the DigiReady module, Arora explains that it integrates
with the MPS ContentStore platform for hosting and distributing
content on online platforms, databases, and through various e-book
retailers. It also integrates with publishers content management sys-
tems.
Several DigiCore-based projects have already been implemented.
We have set up an automated remote composition platform for a
large chemistry publisher, allowing them to generate auto-page
proofs from XML with graphics elements in less than two minutes.
More than 90% of the proofs were accurate at first pass, says
Arora. For a large journals publisher, an automated composition
platform was established to generate a few hundred thousand page
proofs and, in the process, slashed composition costs by more than
50%.
Key members of the MPS sales and marketing divisions are at stand
B1338 in Hall 4.0 to discuss DigiCore. A demonstration with its tech-
nology team can also be arranged via marketing@adi-mps.com.
Qbend
Sal e of e- books i s
Qbends main focus. In
keeping with market
demands, the Dubuque,
Iowa-based company is
beta-launching two new
lines of sales and distri-
bution at the Frankfurt Book Fair: online reading (through Web-
based HTML) and print sales (from the same store selling e-books).
We are focused on providing a technology platform that enables
publishers to create their own online storewith their own content
and company identityto sell e-books, print titles, and online prod-
ucts. They will be supported by our team hosting the site and doing all
the work behind the scenes. This WebStore service, launched in Octo-
ber 2011, covers e-book creation, sales, fulllment, customer intelli-
gence, and is supported by custom and multichannel publishing sys-
tems. This, together with our existing features of selling by parts,
rentals, and subscriptions, will help publishers to pinpoint the best
model for their content, says CEO Kris Srinaath. There are currently
more than 400,000 titles in formats such as EPub and PDFs in the
WebStore.
Another new feature enables consumers to pick the content that
they need and assemble that content into their own digital books.
This is done through the integration of Qbends store solutions with
our patent-pending custom publishing solution, S.N.A.P. [search,
navigate, assemble, publish]. It provides an all-in-one platform that
helps publishers to speed up their digital offerings, while allowing
consumers to choose the content that they want, adds Qbend COO
Kaushik Sampath, pointing out that by using S.N.A.P., publishers can
move into a digital-rst workow and repurpose existing content for
multichannel delivery.
Wolters Kluwer Law and Business (USA), for instance, has its
e-bookstore (echapters.wolterskluwerlb.com) powered by Qbend.
They are the rst publisher to go full-edged into chapter-based
sales. This has opened up an enormous market for Wolters Kluwer,
especially when students are now willing to pay to own smaller pieces
of content instead of borrowing the books from friends or other
sources, says Sampath.
For more on Qbends digital solutions, head over to Hot Spot Pro-
fessional and Scientic Information in Hall 4.2, booth P457, on Octo-
ber 10, 10:1510:45 a.m., and October 11, 33:30 p.m., where Sri-
naath, Sampath, and colleagues will deliver a presentation titled
Accelerate Your E-book Business. More information about Qbend
services can also be obtained at its stand, N443, in Hall 4.2.
Repro India
Mumbai-based Repro
India is parlaying its
expertise in traditional
book printing and distri-
bution and digital solu-
tions to help global enter-
prises gain a competitive
advantage. Managing the source content at our own data repository
center in any format and transforming it correctly for distribution
through any mediume-readers, smartphones, tablets, PCs, Web, or
printis our strength. We enable organizations to achieve opera-
tional excellence and open new revenue streams in a rapidly evolving
digital- and mobile-centric marketplace, says head of content solu-
tions Amit Chavan.
At the Frankfurt Book Fair, Repro India (Hall 8.0, stand H967) is
focused on showcasing its capabilities in converting publishers
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
Rosemont College
invites you to learn about the
changing world of ePublishing
from the comforts of your home or
offce anywhere in the world.
In as little as 21 weeks
(three 7 week sessions),
you can earn your graduate
level certifcate.
rosemont college schools of graduate and professional studies
Introduction to ePublishing
(pre-requisite for other classes)
Content Creation for New Media
Design for New Media
Marketing the New Media
Sales & Distribution for New Media
For more information and
admissions criteria:
www.rosemontcollege.edu
Five classes cover
all areas of ePublishing:
content into multiple formats and embedding them in delivery solu-
tions specically designed to suit the end consumer. This way, we
help our clients to generate multiple revenue streams from the same
basic content, adds Chavan, whose team is also focused on educa-
tional tablet publishing. We are working with publishers to have
their content converted and distributed in the most secure way
directly to the students on their customized educational tablets. The
pilot programs will start in India and a few other countries this quar-
ter, with the plan to roll out the solution in time for the next academic
year.
For executive director Pramod Khera, the way content is sought
and disseminated has changed signicantly in the past few years.
This is largely driven by changing consumer preferences. The prolif-
eration of the Internet and its ubiquity in digital gadgets provides
consumers with so many alternative venues to obtain content, which
has changed the publishing and content industry at the fundamental
level. The economics of monetizing content, for one, has shifted
totally.
Enhancing Repro Indias digital offerings is Kheras goal. He says,
We want to reach our existing customer base and generate newer
opportunities within the growing digital publishing segment. Our
valuable experience in the print verticalgarnered during the past 21
yearsmeans that we can help publishers and corporations to
achieve highly efcient, low-cost digital content production for multi-
channel publication of books, journals, and educational and corpo-
rate content, in addition to our core competency of providing value-
added print solutions. It is a win-win two-in-one strategy for our cli-
ents.
SPi Global
Publishers and content producers have come to realize that various
silosprint vs. digital editorial designs and templates, products using
different schemas and metadata, for instancehave to be unied in
order to create digital products faster or hand-in-hand with print,
thereby maximizing print and digital revenues, says v-p, solutions
architect, John Prabhu of SPi Global, explaining that content man-
agement sys-
tems, workow,
da s hboa r ds ,
data analytics,
di gi t al as s e t
management ,
and social media
now have to be
connected to one another. This unied approach provides a seamless
and cross-channel integrated learning experience where e-textbook,
course, assessment, and grade tracker must come seamlessly together
as a unit.
At its stand (K459 in Hall 4.2), SPi Global will demonstrate various
solutions that reect the companys domain expertise and its semantic
approach to structuring and transforming content for print, e-book,
and mobile formats. As platforms, technologies, and devices con-
tinue to evolve, our focus lies in helping publishers right from the
startat the planning phase, in factby implementing best practices
and process models with a unified approach, explains Prabhu,
whose team will be on hand to discuss and demonstrate HTML5,
reow and xed-layout e-book formats (such as EPub 2, EPub 3, and
Kindle and KF8 formats), and various aspects of content, including
authoring and development, enrichment, distribution, and technol-
ogy. We will also showcase workow development and business
process management.
A recent higher-ed project for a university press underlines SPi
Globals approach. As Prabhu explains: The client has used various
typesetting vendors to compose the titles, and each vendor utilized
different composition toolsQuarkXPress, InDesign, 3B2, LaTeX,
and so onwhile administering their own standards. So our client is
unable to produce digital output faster and cheaper with consistent
user experience. Upon taking on the project, we evaluated the differ-
ent types of content and designed a schema for XML-rst workow,
and went on to provide an end-to-end workow covering copyedit-
ing, peer review, content transformation into e-books, and distribu-
tion into iOS and Android platforms.
Clients are consolidating and reducing their number of vendors,
and wanting to work with fewer vendors, who are able to do end-to-
end publishing solutions including technology and best-practice
approach, adds Prabhu, who will be speaking at two half-hour ses-
sions in Hall 4.2 on the same topic, Flash to HTML5: A Roadmap to
Successful Migrations, at Hot Spot Education (C1437) on October
10 at 10:30 a.m., and at Hot Spot Professional and Scientic Informa-
tion (P457) on October 11 at 12:45 p.m.
Swift Prosys
Building a state-of-the-art end-to-
end solution for cookbooks, chil-
drens books, and illustrated titles
makes perfect sense at Swift Pro-
sys. Says director for technical and
business development Mohan
Thas Shanmugam, Demand is
rising for xed-layout EPub les,
especially for titles with complex
page design. But there are many quality issues in xed-layout EPub
les, particularly those related to fonts, background images, and
overlaid and angled text. Our special conversion engine addresses
these issues while saving clients time and money.
It was one challenging project, a dinosaur series in four languages
(Norwegian, German, Finnish, and Swedish), that led Swift Prosys to
develop the xed-layout conversion engine. According to Shanmu-
gam, Our struggles with the complex layout for each page brought
up several critical questions: Can this process be executed faster? Sim-
plied and automated? How about doing all these while producing
more accurate conversion? So our team wrote specific scripts,
tweaked existing tools, and created new tags. Now we have packed
these tried-and-tested solutions into one automatic xed-layout solu-
tion that can deliver faster results at cheaper costs to clients. By using
this engine, we can create xed-layout EPub les from print PDFs at
about 85% to 95% accuracy level, depending on page complexity.
Manual intervention by our subject matter experts then takes place to
ensure les are corrected, checked against the original, and further
QCed prior to delivery.
Shanmugan and his team also came up with a new portal (http://
ebooks.swiftprosys.com) to help small and independent publishing
clients in their digitization efforts. Clients only need to upload the
PDF les intended for e-book conversion, and we will send them our
competitive quote within 12 hours. It is a hassle-free process, adds
Shanmugam, who has recently received a 50,000-page conversion
project for EPub and Mobi formats from an American client.
For ve-year-old Swift Prosys, its expertise in deciphering hand-
written script (involving burial and cremation registers) and 16th-
and 17th-century tomes with Gothic fonts (for European institutions)
has translated into familiarity with schemas such as TEI, NIMAS,
NLM, Dublin Core, MODS, and METS/ALTO. We have also been
busy with a library project involving MARC 21 standards, for which
we have already delivered 300,000 cards, says Shanmugam. He can
be contacted at mohan@swiftprosys.com or +91 9500055670 for
demonstrations and test samples.
www.publishersweekly.com
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
15
18
www.publishersweekly.com
I
f I had to summarize the future of publishing in just one word,
Id say open. Were living in a very closed publishing world
today. Retailers use tools like digital rights management
(DRM) to lock content, and DRM also tends to lock customers
into a platform. Content itself is still largely developed in a
closed model, with authors writing on their word processor of
choice and editors typically not seeing the content until its almost
complete. Then we have all the platforms that are closed from one
another; have you ever tried reading a mobi le from Amazon in an
EPub reader, for example?
Given these examples of our closed industry, why do I think the
future will be different? It has to do with some of the early indicators
Im seeing through start-ups and other trends. My Tools of Change
(TOC) colleagues and I are in the enviable position of getting to
cross paths with some of the most forward-thinking people in our
industry. We share many of these encounters via our Web site (toc.
oreilly.com) as well as at our in-person events. Id like to share some
of the more interesting ones that are currently on my radar, includ-
ing a few featured at TOC Frankfurt on Tuesday.
Lets look at what exactly open publishing is. The word open is
used a lot in the technology world these
days. Open source projects are just one
example, but open standards are
another. So when people talk about
open publishing, what do they mean?
Its helpful to rst think about what open publishing is not. The
old days, when authors worked on their own until they completed a
manuscript and then handed it on to an editor, is a good example of
publishing thats not open.
Contrast this scenario with one where the author is able to col-
laborate with others, including editors, from the beginning. Feed-
back happens in real time, and everyone on the project operates
synchronously. This is open publishing. It might sound chaotic, but
with the right tools it can be a wonderful experience. The key word
here is synchronous, and one of the key shifts is the movement of
the editors role toward real-time editing.
Open publishing can support a variety of collaborative and itera-
tive development models. There are rapid intense development
models like book sprints, where several people write a book in
three to ve days, or slower models often referred to as iterative
or agile book development. If youre not familiar with these
phrases, you need to be, as they are part of the new lexicon of book
development and open publishing. Each of these models offers the
producers the opportunity to engage in rich dialogue with others
while producing content. This in turn enriches the text while also
speeding up content development and helping alleviate negative
motivation factors, which often confront those facing the momen-
tous task of writing a book alone.
Another important part of open publishing is the role the reader
plays in the development of a book. Books can be released in a raw
early state to readers for feedback, and hence early readers become
part of the development cycle. These releases are sometimes referred
to as a minimum viable product, or MVP, a term borrowed from
software development. MVP strategies provide your customers
with a glimpse of what youre creating well before its nished, and
give you the opportunity to gather feedback from your readers and
make adjustments to better suit their needs. An MVP is the smallest
version of your initial product you can use to gauge customer feed-
back. That might be an outline and a couple of chapters. Or it might
be just a summary of what the book will cover. It all depends on
what youre looking to learn from your customers.
Once you realize the benets of synchronous production, real-
time editing, early reading, and MVPs, you quickly see why open
publishing can be an appealing model for content and business.
Adam Hyde and Fabienne Riener led a panel on open publishing at
TOC Frankfurt on Tuesday. Be sure to tune in to toc.oreilly.com for
future discussions about this important topic.
Content Access via APIs
Developing content in an open manner is great, but how can we
ensure the nished product is also available in an open format? One
way is to leverage what are known as APIs, or application program-
ming interfaces. Thats really just a fancy way of saying youve made
your content available in a fashion where developers can come in and
easily gain access to it.
Publishings Open Future
Cooperation, collaboration can help
ease the digital transition
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
BY JOE WIKERT
Use our Digital Comps system to provide
instant, secure access for reviewers,
academics and colleagues. Or experiment
with marketing campaigns and mail-out
vouchers to consumers. With our intuitive
follow-up and feedback tools marketing
your books is a whole lot easier.
Go to www.ebookservices.com,
email info@ebookservices.com, or
visit us for more information at 8.0 R933.
DISTRIBUTING &
PROMOTING YOUR
EBOOKS JUST
BECAME EASIER.
19
www.publishersweekly.com
You might be wondering why youd ever want to enable devel-
oper access to your content. Weve all heard of developers whove
gone rogue and created viruses and other destructive applications.
Exposing your content via APIs doesnt mean you lose control over
it. What it does mean is that you open the door for new methods of
content discovery and consumption that you might not have
thought about before.
Im betting that the next phase of content distribution will come
from someone outside our industry, not inside it. Those of us who
have been in publishing for a while are simply too attached to exist-
ing models. Were resistant to change and therefore not likely to
come up with the next big idea. Thats where the API model really
shines. If you set your API access up correctly, youll empower
countless developers to take your content and make it available in
new ways. Youll be able to dictate certain ground rules (e.g., how
much content can be given away for free, minimum pricing of prod-
ucts, etc.), but youll also want to be careful and not make the rules
too restrictive.
An easy way to start down this path is to make your metadata
available through APIs. Developers can then start reimagining new
methods of discovery for the content your metadata describes, and
you can relax, knowing you havent exposed all your intellectual
property just yet. When that proves successful, though, the next step
would be to work with some of those same developers and make
available portions of your content.
ValoBox is one of the start-ups doing a lot of work in the content
API arena. Thanks to the magic of APIs, they offer a quick and easy
way to embed one of their books anywhere on your Web site. Read-
Social is another terric example and one of the most interesting
start-ups in the social content space. Although some still say reading
is a solitary activity, ReadSocial is showing just how useful an open,
sharing reading experience can be. ReadSocial believes so much in
the notion of open standards that the founders built the entire plat-
form on a set of APIs.
Evolution of DRM
DRM is one of those hot-button topics. Most people tend to be either
very supportive of it or ercely opposed. There seems to be no fence-
sitting on this one. The majority of publishers insisted on DRM
before theyd commit their content to e-book format. That was their
security blanket and one way to convince skeptical authors that
e-books are worth pursuing. Whats ironic here is that this same
DRM has been instrumental in retailers ability to create platform
lock-in for consumers. Since you cant move your Kindle e-books to
a Nook, for example, every purchase you make from Amazon makes
it harder for you to eventually leave its platform.
Most of the big publishers still support DRM, if not insist on it.
Macmillan is the lone member of the Big Six American publishers
that has opted to test the DRM-free space with its Tor imprint.
Then theres whats known as social DRM, which is where the
e-book can be copied and easily redistributed, but it typically con-
tains sensitive information such as the owners name or, worse,
credit card number. By inserting this information into the le the
publisher or retailer hopes to discourage the owner from letting the
e-book sneak out into the wild.
At the end of the day, though, DRM offers nothing more than a
false sense of security to intellectual property owners. Every form
of DRM can be hacked, and the unlocked le can then be shared
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
20
www.publishersweekly.com
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
with friends and strangers alike.
Social DRM is even more easily bro-
ken, as that sensitive personal infor-
mation can be very easily removed
from the le.
Some would argue that the only
way to prevent piracy is to never
release an e-book to begin with. Thats another myth. After all, prior
to the launch of the Pottermore site, the Harry Potter series was not
available in e-book format, yet each of the titles was among the most
oft-pirated books on the planet. Scanning technology means that
print-only books wont remain print-only for very long.
Given all these facts, why bother with DRM at all? It simply
penalizes your trustworthy customers and treats everyone like a
common criminal. We debated the pros and cons of DRM at TOC
Frankfurt on Tuesday, and well continue to share both sides of the
story in person and online at toc.oreilly.com.
Apps, Platforms, Formats, and HTML5
One of the biggest opportunities for an open publishing future has to
do with both platforms (e.g., iOS, Android, Windows) and formats
(e.g., EPub, mobi, PDF). There are countless horror stories of pub-
lishers investing in native apps for iOS devices only to later discover
that theyll have to invest at least as much as theyve already spent to
get the same app onto the Android platform. You also have to deal
with the retailers cut of any sales of those native apps or the in-app
content they serve up. In other words, native apps lead to a very
closed model where only the target platform is served and signicant
expense must be incurred to port
them elsewhere.
A similar situation exists with
formats. PDF is the granddaddy
of them all and remains extremely
popular with OReillys custom-
ers. EPub and mobi are quickly
gaining momentum, though. And although PDFs can be read on a
Kindle and EPubs can be read on a variety of devices, theres no one
format that seems to solve all the problems of open, cross-platform
use. Or is there?
HTML5 is the format thats often overlooked. Its the lingua
franca of the Web, but I believe its also the future of an open content
model for publishers. HTML5 is, in fact, at the very core of the latest
version of EPub, Epub 3. HTML5 offers a variety of features that
allow publishers to render anything from the simplest text-only
novel to the richest, immersive digital product that leverages audio
and video as well.
So if HTML5 is so terric, why hasnt the industry already fully
embraced it? To answer this question you need to keep in mind that
e-book retailers dont feel an open, barrier-free content delivery
platform like HTML5 is in their best interest. Remember that
todays retailers have built their market share by locking customers
in, not by giving them the choice of reading anyones content on
their device. (The partial exception here is Apple, where you can
easily load many competing e-book apps on an iPhone or iPad, but
Apples own content from their iBookstore can be read only on an
iOS device.) The simple truth is the Kindle gave birth to todays
e-book marketplace, and theres no way Amazon is going to tear
down the walls theyve carefully constructed around the garden.
That means that either another retailer will pave the way to an
HTML5 future or publishers will forge an alliance to do it for them-
selves. The U.S. Department of Justice has publishers worried about
being charged with any sort of collusion these days, so I gure a
retailer will have to intervene. That retailer will either be a start-up
or a second-tier player with little to lose by breaking the rules of the
walled gardens.
Whoever does it has a bright future, and theyll be creating a ter-
ric user experience. After all, imagine not being tied to any given
device or vendor. DRM goes away in this world too as content is
streamed to the user, much the way Netflix does with video, so
HTML5 helps on a number of open fronts.
Lets Open This Up Together
As you can see, this open vision wont happen overnight, and you
can bet the entrenched leaders will have something to say about it,
especially as it threatens their market positions. Id like to think this
article has helped you see the value in shifting our industry to more
of an open model. Being open doesnt mean were carefree about
our intellectual property; rather, it means were dramatically
improving the customers user experience and building a future we
have more of a stake in than what we see today in our largely closed
environment.
As I mentioned earlier, we covered many of these topics at TOC
Frankfurt, and well go into more depth on them at TOC New York,
next February 1214. I hope youll join us in New York, but in the
meantime please be sure to follow the community discussion at toc.
oreilly.com and sign up for our free newsletter at http://oreilly.com/
toc/newsletter.csp.
Wikert is general manager and publisher at O'Reilly Media and
chair of the Tools of Change Conference.
Visit us at Stand M417, Hall 4.2
to learn how we can transform your business.
www.publishingtechnology.com www.pcgplus.com
PCG
CONTENT
SYSTEMS
AUDIENCE
DEVELOPMENT
CONTENT
DELIVERY
Move your content forward
PT_frankfort_adR2_10_312_2.indd 1 10/3/12 2:43 PM
IBS Bookmaster
The only integrated business system for
print, POD and digital delivery that includes
Rights, Royalties and Permissions.
For more information contact info@ibs.net
Americas
Oliver Holden
+1 781-929-0205
EMEA
Andy Lancaster
+44 7887-557774
APAC
Susanna Ng
+61 416-101-088
22
www.publishersweekly.com
O
ne day, the year 2012 may be
remembered as the year of the
multimedia tablet device. At
least ve companiesAmazon,
Google, Barnes & Noble,
Kobo, and Microsofthave released
upgraded or new tablet devices, all
aimed at competing with Apples iPad,
the undisputed king of the tablet com-
puting realm. Once again, tablets and
digital readers are poised to dominate
holiday gift giving, thanks to a market-
place crammed with reasonably priced,
high-performance devices. Here is a
chart of the most popular tablets that
offer consumers a place to read e-books
and other content.
Tale of the Tablets
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
BY CALVIN REID
Kindle Fire HD
Price: 7-in. ($199, 16GB); 8.9-in. ($299, 16GB; $499, 4G LTE with dataplan)
Screen: High res 7-in., 8.9-in.
Operating system: customized Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)
Processor: 1.2 GHz dual core
Camera: front facing
Titles/apps: More than 1.2 million for-pay e-books, millions of free books,
hundreds of thousands of audiobooks, movies, TV shows, apps
Battery life: 11 hours reading or video
Storage: 16GB, 32GB
Connectivity: 7-in. (Wi-Fi); 8.9-in. (Wi-Fi/4G LTE)
Hype: Upgraded in every way, its still no iPad, but offers better performance
and optimized access to Amazons content bonanza.
Google Nexus 7
Price: $199 (8GB)
Screen: 7-in.
Operating system: Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)
Processor: 1.2 GHz quad core
Camera: front facing
Titles/apps: Hundreds of thousands of for-pay
e-books, millions of free e-books/400,000 apps
in Google Play
Battery life: 8 hours
Storage: 8GB, 16GB
Connectivity: Wi-Fi
Hype: Compares well to the iPadits light,
has a fast processor, great screen, and decent
content through Google Play
iPad
Price: $500 (16GB) to start; iPad 2 $400
(16GB)
Screen: High res 9.7-in. screen and,
perhaps, by mid-October a rumored
7.85-in. screen iPad mini.
Operating system: iOS 6
Processor: 1 GHz dual core
Camera: front and back facing
Titles/apps: 1.5 million free and for-pay
books/250,000 iPad apps
Battery life: 10 hours (video)
Storage: 16GB, 32 GB, 64 GB
Connectivity: Wi-Fi/cell
Hype: Its an iPad worldeverything
else is ghting for second place.
Kindle-Fire-HD-8.9
Kindle-Fire-HD-7

ODER IM
COMFORTLIGHT
LESEN SIE BEI
SONNENLICHT
BERZEUGEN SIE SICH SELBST IN HALLE 8, STAND G919
EIN eREADER FR JEDERMANN www.kobo.de
Kobo Glo rckt eReading in ein vllig neues Licht. Unser innovatives, einstellbares ComfortLight ist die perfekte
Ergnzung zu unserem hochaufsenden E-Ink-Display. Die Aufsung ist um 28% hher als bei unserem Kobo
Touch, so werden Wrter und Bilder so gestochen scharf angezeigt, als seien sie auf Papier gedruckt.
24
www.publishersweekly.com
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
Galaxy Tab 2 7.0, 10.1
Price: Tab 2 7.0-in. ($250, 8GB);
Tab 2 10.1-in. ($400, 16GB)
Screen: High res 7-in. and 10.1-in.
Operating system: Android 4.0 (Ice Cream
Sandwich)
Processor: 1 GHz dual core
Camera: front and rear
facing
Titles/apps: Millions of
free/for-pay titles, apps,
music via Google Play
Battery life: 7.0 (12 hours);
10.1 (11 hours)
Storage: 7.0 (8GB expand-
able); 10.1 (16GB expand-
able)
Connectivity: Wi-Fi
Hype: Hailed as the rst
serious challenger to the
iPad when the 7-in. Tab
was released in 2011,
Galaxy Tab devices (now in
two screen sizes) have been
overtaken by just about
everyone on price, perfor-
mance, content, and sales.
Kobo Arc
Price: $200 (8GB)
Screen: High res 7-in.
Operating system:
customized Android
4.0 (Ice Cream Sand-
wich)
Processor: 1.5 GHz
dual core
Camera: front facing
Titles/apps: 2 million
for-pay e-books, 1
million free e-books/600,000 apps via Google Play
Battery life: 10 hours reading
Storage: 16GB, 32GB, 64GB
Connectivity: Wi-Fi
Hype: Major upgrade from the clunky Kobo Vox, adding
faster processor, front-facing stereo speakers, and Tapestries,
an innovative content display/discovery interface.
Microsoft Surface, Surface Pro
Price: to be determined
Screen: High res 10.6-in. HD
Operating system: Surface (Windows
RT), Surface Pro (Windows 8)
Processor: Surface (ARM); Surface
Pro (Intel chip) specs unreleased
Camera: front and rear facing
Titles/apps: Millions of for-pay
and free e-books via e-book
retailer apps/maybe
about 2,000 apps via
the Windows store.
Battery life: estimates range from 6 hours
(Surface) to 7.5 (Surface Pro).
Storage: Surface (32GB, 65GB); Surface Pro (64GB, 128 GB)
expandable
Connectivity: Wi-Fi
Hype: Microsoft enters the hardware business with two
cleverly designed tablets (running two different OS),
to the chagrin of their hardware partners; the Surface is
expected to be available when Windows 8 is released on
October 26; Surface Pro is expected around January.
Nook HD, Nook HD+
Price: 7-in. Nook HD ($199, 8GB) and 9-in. Nook HD+
($269, 16GB)
Screen: High res 7-in., 9-in.
Operating system: customized Android 4.0 (Ice Cream
Sandwich)
Processor: Nook HD (1.3 GHz dual core);
Nook HD+ (1.5 GHz dual core)
Camera: No cameras
Titles/apps: 3 million for-pay and free e-books/10,000
apps
Battery life: 10 hours for reading
Storage: 8 GB, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB with
expandable storage
Connectivity: Wi-Fi
Hype: B&Ns revamped Nook tablets now offer
improved screens, faster processors, new prole and
recommendation interfaces, and more content via the
newly launched Nook Video service.
Tale
of the
Tablets
Nook HD
Nook HD
Plus

Samsung
Galaxy
Tab2 10.1
Samsung
Galaxy
Tab2 7.0

26
www.publishersweekly.com
A
lthough some publishers and distributors were in the digital
space long before Amazon introduced the Kindle in Novem-
ber 2007, the then-$399 device, offering seamless down-
loads of relatively inexpensive digital books, was denitely
the game changer. In the intervening ve years, not only have
devices and formats morphed and multipliedand with them chal-
lenges, not least of which is how many ISBNs a single e-book needs
but new retail players have continued to emerge. Zola Books, which is
still in beta, will begin selling later this year; Kobo is about to relaunch
in the U.S. with independent booksellers; and even Ingram is working
on an e-book solution (no date has been set yet).
Despite the recession and churning in the marketplace, publishers
and distributors continue to see huge opportunities for e growth
both in the U.S. and overseas. Rick Joyce, chief marketing ofcer for
the Perseus Books Group, which offers a suite of digital distribution
services through its Constellation division, anticipates e-book sales
doubling in the U.S. this year and increasing two-, three-, or even
fourfold in the rest of the world, which is two years behind the U.S. in
e-retailing and devices. The biggest e channel continues to be
online retailers, according to Sabrina McCarthy, president of Perseus
Distribution Client Services, Argo Navis, and Perseus Distribution,
who is seeing sales of some titles be as much as 30% to 40% digital,
while others, like serious nonction, average 10% to 15%.
Weve had a great 2012 in both print and e, although our e-book
business is growing at a faster pace than print, with e-book sales hav-
ing grown each and every month vs. the prior month, says Larry
Bennett, president of distribution at BookMasters . Overall, we are
aiming at generating close to 20% of our sales through e-books.
Because of an international push earlier this year, BookMasters has
seen a 10% increase in sales across the board and has had good
pickup, particularly for its Christian and romance titles.
At National Book Network, which offers
e-books and conversion through NBN Fusion,
e-book sales have more than doubled in each of
the past three years. As a percentage of overall
sales, e-books should exceed 10% in 2012,
says Ron Powers, v-p of digital publishing.
During the Frankfurt Book Fair, NBN is doing
a full push to all 90 publishers represented in
the U.K. and EMEA by its sister company,
NBN International, so that they have access to
the full suite of NBN Fusion services, including international e-book
distribution.
Where once publishers dipped their toes into digital with one dis-
tributor and print with another, increasingly presses are seeing the
value of looking at a title as a titleand having the same house repre-
sent both. The same person who is selling Amazon is selling Kindle
opportunities. The marketing is very, very similar. Then its up to the
consumer what format they want to read, says Publishers Group
West president Susan Reich, who just signed Entrepreneur Press for
physical distribution after working with them for a year and a half on
digital. Theres still plenty of room for digital-only specialists in a
dynamic market. INscribe Digital represents a number of print pub-
lishers along with individual authors. It sold Bared to You in digital,
until author Sylvia Day signed with Penguin, and recently added
Jackie Collinss backlist and some digital-only titles to its roster.
New markets continue to open up. Its no secret that the big U.S.-
based retail and consumer media companies are selling a lot of digital
books, says Shawn Morin, COO of Ingram Content Group. How-
ever, we continue to see an emerging trend in categories and verticals
that may be best served by subject. We have also just started to see
some retailerssuch as Flipkart in India, Bilbary in the U.K., and Fish-
pond in New Zealand [and Australia]start to service a more interna-
tional customer base. We will continue to look for customers that have
the capability to help us connect publishers with consumers.
At BookMasters too, the lions share of the sales goes through the
top four retail outletsAmazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.
But what is most interesting, says Bennett, are the numerous
smaller e-book outlets that cater to specic niches, be they public
library lending programs or genre-specic e-book stores. Our Chris-
tian titles very much benet from the smaller Christian-specic out-
lets in the U.S. and around the world.
At Independent Publishers Group, in addition to the U.S., Canada
is doing nicely, says president Mark Suchomel. Were not just con-
tinuing to keep up with the market. Were exploring where we can sell
directly to libraries and consumers. In the past few months, IPG
began experimenting with putting its shopping cart on its publishers
Getting a Handle on Digital Distribution
Distributors see global growth opportunities
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
BY JUDITH ROSEN
Were not just continuing
to keep up with the market.
Were exploring where we
can sell directly to libraries
and consumers.
Mark Suchomel,

president, Independent Publishers Group
Ron Power
Working with
NBN Fusion is a
FORMORE
INFORMATIONCONTACT:

Why Join NBN Fusion?


NBNFusionhasalreadynegotiatedandsignedfavorablecontracts
withallthemajorvendors
We handle the le conversions to t each unique requirement of
our vendors regardless of the le formats they utilize
Westore,manageandupdateyourdataweekly
Yourdataissecurewithtightlycontrolledaccess
and24hourmonitoring
Weprovidemarketingincatalogs,runadsinkeymediaandsend
outTwitterandFacebookannouncements
Ourrepteammonitorsallvendorsalestokeepyourtitlesfront
andcenterinthemarket!
Weprovideyouwithcomprehensiveandin-depthreports
thatpresentvisibilityontitleingestion,maintenance,andsales.
Ron Powers
VicePresident,DigitalSales
301-459-3366ex5529
Cell:615-477-4621
rpowers@rowman.com
Best of All, no up-front fees!
Youonlypayuswhenyou
sellabookandcollectyourmoney
Questions?
Stop by Hall 8, Stand E954
at the Frankfurt Book Fair!
n a t i o n a l b o o k n e t w o r k
Toby Waller
MarketingandNewBusinessManager
+44(0)1752202306
toby.waller@nbninternational.com
NBN Fusion Resized2.indd 1 9/20/12 11:58 AM
28
www.publishersweekly.com
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
THE INTERNATIONAL SOURCE FOR BOOK PUBLISHING & BOOKSELLING
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY KEEPS YOU INFORMED.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY is essential reading for anyone
interested in the world of books and the business of book
publishing. Editors, agents, publishers, booksellers, media,
and librarians, in the U.S. and abroad, have come to
depend on our content, whether in print or online, to help
them do their jobs. Our news editors stay abreast of mergers
and acquisitions, market trends, shifts in the supply chain, new technologies,
copyright debates and more. Our reviews staff offers up more than 200
pre-publication book reviews a week, and we post even more online. Author
interviews, analysis of category trends, and our famous bestseller lists, now
done in partnership with Nielsen BookScan, make for a comprehensive
and up-to-the-minute picture of the publishing business. Booksellers and
librarians look to our seasonal listings of forthcoming titlesadult, childrens,
religion, audioand now we also cover the growing phenomenon of self-
publishing. And we cover every major book fair and trade show that is
relevant to books. Publishers Weekly is an indispensable source for everything
to do with book publishing.
EXPERT INFORMATION IS JUST A CLICK AWAY!
Digital editions available on iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Nook, Kindle, Kobo, Sony Reader, Nexus 7, and all Android devices
Sign up for these FREE resources:
WEBCASTS/PODCASTS,
E-NEWSLETTERS:
PW Daily
Childrens Bookshelf
NOW TWICE A WEEK
Cooking the Books
Comics World
Religion BookLine
Tip Sheet
facebook.com/pubweekly
twitter.com/PublishersWkly
www.publishersweekly.com
1/2H_PWshowAD.indd 1 10/3/12 3:36 PM
Web sites. When a customer clicks the Buy button at sites for Nomad
Press or the Urban Land Institute, the order goes directly to IPGs
back ofce. We try to identify where publishers have problems and
provide a solution for them, says Suchomel of the program. It
doesnt make sense for publishers to build it themselves. We have
everything right here. Publishers only incur a cost when a book is
sold, and that allows them to retain customer information.
The digital landscape is changing so fast that distributors recom-
mend that any presses who have been either reluctant to get started or
dont have the money to convert their entire backlist begin by making
at least a few bestsellers available as e-books now. Make a strategy
rather than [anticipate] where the broad market is going, says Per-
seuss Joyce. Quoting Stephen Page, CEO of the U.K.s Faber & Faber,
a Perseus partner, responding to journalists questions about when the
market is going to be 50% e, he adds, Stop trying to gure out whats
going to happen in three years. Prognostication is procrastination.
Once publishers do get started, tracking territorial rights is rela-
tively easy. Most distributors can plug rights information into their
computer systems. Within these parameters, they can then offer pub-
lishers two options. They can sign rights and permission for a set of
retailers so that when Amazon, Apple, or Sony moves into a new terri-
tory, books will be there (providing the publisher has rights for that
country or area), or publishers can designate specic territories where
they want their books to be available.
The Road Ahead
Not that going digital isnt without its difculties, especially as the
Department of Justice lawsuit on e-book pricing continues to wend
its way through the courts and throws a wrinkle in the agency pricing
model. As NBNs Powers points out, It can be challenging doing
protable business in a constantly changing landscape. Even so, the
evolution of the agency model is just a small speed bump compared
to providing e-book files in multiple formats, handling complex
treatments like cookbooks, and managing metadata.
Weve spent a lot of the past six to eight
months on what the future looks like, and were
focused on a greater move to digital, and we
looked at how we ensure that our developers
are streamlining what they do, says Anne
Kubek, executive v-p, general manager, of
INscribe Digital. We really believe that is
where the future of this industry is going. By
having fewer human hands touch the meta-
data, she notes that it will be more accurate. Incomplete or error-rid-
den metadata really slows everything down, she adds. And if it can
be submitted more easily, her hope is that it will free up publishers to
spend more time creating more device-specic content, as Becker &
Mayer!, which is looking to launch a digital series in 3-D, is doing.
Another challenge is finding ways to counter showrooming at
Shawn Morin
29
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
www.publishersweekly.com
bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Traditional retailers are an impor-
tant part of the content distribution network, whether e or p, says
Morin at Ingram, which will begin distributing Kobo devices for the
American Booksellers Association when its partnership with Kobo
rolls out at more than 400 independents in the U.S. At a certain
point, retailers need to be in a position to create a unique selling prop-
osition for consumers.
Others are taking a more proactive stance. We want to help the
retailer maintain their consumer base, says Bill Schanes, v-p of pur-
chasing at Diamond Comic Distributors. Six weeks ago Diamond
and digital comics vendor iVerse Media launched Diamond Digital to
enable comics shop owners to do exactly that by selling digital down-
loads of comics. On Mondays retailers can download a list of codes
for digital comics that will be available in print on Wednesdays. They
can then use the digital edition as an add-on sale in-store. For an addi-
tional 99, customers can have both the print and a plus digital
We have also just started to
see some retailerssuch as
Flipkart in India, Bilbary in
the U.K., and Fishpond in
New Zealand [and Australia]
start to service a more
international customer base.
Shawn Morin,
COO, Ingram Content Group
copy. Or customers can buy just the digi-
tal edition for $1 less than the print price.
It may not be the sexy way to do
this, says Schanes. We really feel like
[retailers are] being left out in the cold.
So far the program is available only for
comics in North America, but Schanes
says that graphic novels will be available
soon and that digital comics will roll out internationally in the rst or
second quarter of 2013. Comics shops have been slow to adopt.
Although Diamond services 2,000 direct comics shops, only a tenth,
or just under 200, have signed up.
Showrooming is going to exist. Rather than ght it, lets facilitate
it and give everybody credit for it, says IPGs Suchomel, whose goal
is for sales representatives to be able to talk about, and sell, all formats
with all retailers. Currently, hes in conversations with Zola to com-
pensate IPGs reps on consumer purchases through bookstores pres-
ence on the Zola site. It will give them good incentive to pay atten-
tion to our e-books, says Suchomel, who is open to a similar arrange-
ment with Kobo. Both e-tailers offer booksellers commissions on
e-book sales. To date Kobo hasnt reached out to credit reps for digital
sales at indies.
Its still such an early-stage industry, as INscribes Kubek points
out. But with $35.3 billion in online sales overall in November and
December 2011, according to comScore.com, an increase of 15%
over 2010, and strong e-book sales in the following quarter, e-book
distributors and their clients are poised to benet this holiday season.
Even more could gain traction this year with the Kindle Fire, Nook
Tablet, and larger iPhone 5, which can display e-books in color.
Comprehensive
Publishing
Solutions
Content
Digital and
Print Production
Fulfillment
P-Books &
E-Books
Across
media
Across
Geographies
EDUCATIONAL CONTENT MANAGEMENT
TO DELIVERY SOLUTIONS
EDUCATIONAL CONTENT MANAGEMENT
TO DELIVERY SOLUTIONS
V
I
S
I
T
OUR S
T
A
L
L
V
I
S
I
T
O U R S
T
A
L
L
H 967
Educational Books
Childrens Books
Trade & Retail Books
Customised
Print-on-Demand
solutions
We will MANAGE your CONTENT to give you
a ZERO INVENTORY solution
by DIGITISING, PRINTING & DELIVERING
e-books and p-books
to fulfill your clients requirements
Wherever, Whenever
from ONE to a MILLION copies
REPRO INDIA LIMITED Tel.: 91-22-2483 4000 Fax: 91-22-2483 4001 E-mail: info@reproindialtd.com www.reproindialtd.com
Partnering publishers globally
Wed be delighted to welcome you to Repro, one of Indias largest education publishing solution companies.
Frankfurt Ad_New.indd 1 9/28/12 4:20:38 PM
30
www.publishersweekly.com
T
he extent to which e-books have become an important part of
U.S. publishers sales mix was made a bit clearer in a recently
released report from Aptara. Its fourth annual survey of pub-
lishers e-book business, co-sponsored by PW, found that
e-book sales accounted for more than 10% of revenue at 36%
of publishers. According to the survey, 40% of trade houses had
e-book sales that accounted for more than 10% of sales, while only
6% of trade publishers said they had no revenue from e-books. Even
among k12 publishers, where e-book adoption has been slow, only
13% of publishers said they generated no revenue from e-books in the
past year. The increase in sales was accompanied by an increase in
output, as 64% of trade houses are now making at least half of their
titles available as e-books. Overall, 57% of all publishers are making
more than half of their titles available as e-books, compared to only
31% two years ago.
As publishers increase their output, they are continuing to use out-
side vendors and partners to help them achieve their goals; 54% of
publishers said they use an external vendor, up one percentage point
from 2011. While 38% of publishers said they had no substantial
issues with the work of their partners, 29% said quality was a concern.
Trade publishers showed the most concern with quality, with 38% say-
ing that quality was a challenge when working with outside vendors.
The growth in e-book sales is good news for Amazon as publishers
continued to cite that e-tailer as the most important outlet for e-book
sales, followed by the Apple iBookstore and with Barnes & Nobles
e-bookstore in third place. The report also noted that despite the atten-
tion the agency pricing model
has received, only 30% of
reporting publishers used
agency pricing (albeit until the
Justice Department lawsuit, the
six largest trade houses used it),
whi l e 64% sol d e-books
through the wholesale model.
Overall, only 16% of all pub-
lishers said they used the
agency model to sell e-books.
A new question in this years
survey looked into how many
publishers were involved with
translating e-books. With
e-book adoption slower in
most countries outside of the
U.S., it was not surprising that
translation has not been on the
top of American houses to-do
lists. Only 17% of trade pub-
lishers said they have produced
a translated e-book, although
the percentages were higher in
the college and k-12 segments.
This years survey also asked
some more detailed questions
about production methods.
According to the report, 41% of trade houses now use a digital-rst
production method rather than a print-based process, a gure that put
trade publishers ahead of the other publishing sectors in moving to a
digital-rst workow, where a single input lets them produce digital,
print, and mobile formats. Adobe InDesign was the favorite tool both
for creating e-book content and for producing e-books. As a creation
tool it edged out XML, while on the production side it had a clearer
lead, with other in second place and unsure in third. All publish-
ers have, however, moved relatively quickly to use xed layouts for
e-books as more publish childrens books, coffee table books, graphic
novels, and other illustrated digital texts. Fifty-eight percent of pub-
lishers (and 57% of trade houses) said they produce fixed layout
e-books.
The jury still seems to be out on the value of enhanced e-books. Only
12% of publishers said an enhanced e-book had a meaningful impact
on an e-books sales. Among trade houses, 5% said enhanced e-books
had a positive impact, 34% said they had no impact, while 61% said
they had a marginal impact or publishers were unsure what the impact
was.
Few publishers see e-books entirely replacing print; 90% of trade
houses said e-books will be sold along with print, with only 10%
expecting digital to replace print books. Only in the college market did
a meaningful percentage of publishers believe digital could replace
print, with 20% predicting that will happen at some point.
The full report can be downloaded at http://ww3.aptaracorp.com/
lp/landingpages/4thebooksurveyregister.html.
E-books Ring the Registers
New survey nds that e-books now account for at least 10% of sales
at 36% of publishers
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
BY JIM MILLIOT
PUBLISHER TYPE BREAKDOWN TRADE PROF'L COLLEGE K-12 NEWS/MAG. CORPORATE
0% 6% 4% 8% 13% 11% 24%
1%10% 55% 62% 52% 60% 55% 18%
11%25% 26% 24% 26% 18% 33% 24%
>25% 14% 10% 15% 10% 0% 35%
PERCENTAGE OF REVENUE COMING FROM E-BOOKS
PUBLISHER TYPE BREAKDOWN TRADE PROF'L COLLEGE K-12 NEWS/MAG. CORPORATE
1%25% 23% 24% 21% 45% 22% 24%
26%50% 13% 10% 10% 15% 11% 6%
51%75% 12% 14% 13% 3% 22% 18%
76%100% 48% 49% 48% 33% 33% 35%
Unsure 4% 3% 8% 5% 0% 18%
PERCENTAGE OF TITLES DISTRIBUTED AS E-BOOKS
SOURCE: APTARA'S FOURTH ANNUAL EBOOK SURVEY OF PUBLISHERS.
Connect/Explore/Create
TOC brings together smart, highly motivated people from
a wide range of companies and organizations. Join us at
TOC events to learn from industry leaders, network with
colleagues, and help shape the future of publishing.
TOC New YOrk
February 12-14, 2013 | New York, NY
n
MINI TOC VaNCOuVer
October 19-20, 2012 | Vancouver, BC
n
MINI TOC CharlesTON
November 7, 2012 | Charleston, SC
n
TOC BOlOgNa
March 24, 2013 | Bologna, Italy
J
O
I
N

t
h
E

P
u
B
l
I
S
h
I
N
g

C
O
N
V
E
r
S
a
t
I
O
N
For more information, visit toc.oreilly.com/events
2012 OReilly Media, Inc. OReilly logo is a registered trademark of OReilly Media, Inc. 12854
save 15%
use code PWFF
32
www.publishersweekly.com
O
ffering a snapshot of the digital publishing marketplace at a
time of explosive growth and innovation, BlueLoop Con-
cepts, a research and consulting rm in Algonquin, Ill., spe-
cializing in mobile media markets, has released a new report,
The eBook Platform Landscape, which tracks the growth
of the sector and the trends driving it. Besides providing concise pro-
les of 29 digital publishing ventures, the report also isolates eight
market trends, especially the rising importance of global markets and
the mobile phone technology that principally serves them.
BlueLoop Concepts founder Chris Rechtsteiner, who has a 20-year
background in mobile computing, said he began working on the
report after elding endless questions about the digital publishing
landscape and the growth in e-book start-ups. I was constantly
asked, what are the digital publishing start-ups and what do they do,
Rechtsteiner said in a phone interview. Rechtsteiner said it seems
there are three or four new digital publishing companies launching
every day, and that the range of new companies and services was so
broad, he rst needed to dene the subject.
Rechtsteiner said he identied 92 companies that offer production-
level independent e-book author or publisher platforms and services.
Essentially, he said, he dened a digital publishing start-up as a collab-
orative creative platform that allows either authors or publishers to
produce and distribute digital content. Sixty of the original 92 compa-
nies were invited to be interviewed; eventually, 34 interviews were con-
ducted and used to produce short proles of 29 digital publishing start-
ups. Generally well-known rms like Amazon, Google, Kobo, and
Barnes & Noble are not included in the report. The 29 proles offer
brief descriptions of each company and a summation of what its plat-
form offers, as well as a short projection by Rechtsteiner of how the
company is likely to fare in the evolving e-publishing market.
Among the companies proled are such start-ups as BiblioCrunch,
Smashwords, Wattpad, Graphicly, and the Atavist. The interviews
also allowed Rechtsteiner to compile a list of eight key trends he sees
driving the current marketplace for digital content. Among the trends
he identies are A Dynamic Denition of the Cloud, Meta For-
mats and Rapidly Evolving Standards, Shorter Attention Spans
Require Different Structures, and A Global Game. The report is
offered to anyone free of charge in the form of a PDF once a contact
information form is lled out.
Rechtsteiner said the big overall trends of the digital marketplace
are collaboration, discovery, distribution, and connection. He said
his report focuses on the importance of audience development and
the need to identify digital tools that can help bring authors into the
market and connect them directly to readers, as well as tools that pub-
lishers can use to help their authors do just that. Software distribution
will allow author and publishers to make money on smaller audi-
ences, he said, noting that a one-to-one relationship with readers is
key. This will change the way books are written. If people like a minor
character, the creators will know and they can expand on it. There
will be new ways to monetize content.
Rechtsteiner was particularly bullish on the global market for
digital content, emphasizing that the potential for international reve-
nue was huge. He noted that about 35% of the inquiries hes
received about the report came from outside the U.S., pointing to
requests from Zimbabwe and from Arab countries. Territorial
rights is a problem, he said. Twenty percent to 25% of all revenue is
left on the table when authors sell only in the U.S. Theres the poten-
tial for a ood of books and content into these global markets that
will in turn spark the development of local native content.
Rechtsteiner also emphasized that publishers need to understand
that these new markets may have a reading experience that is very dif-
ferent than what is acceptable in the West. Youre going to see massive
growth in content via mobile technology because thats how most of
the world accesses the Internet.
Indeed Rechtsteiner pointed to the demand for a book like Fifty
Shades of Grey to illustrate what he called a new media phenomenon,
the massive expectation that a book that reaches some mass level of
popularity will be available everywhere, immediately. No matter
where it comes from, if it gets big, its not acceptable to be available in
only one place. And, he said, if a property is locked into some sort of
territorial restriction, people will get it in whatever way they can.
When a property is digital, he said, consumers expect it to be avail-
able. It used to be about making money, but now its going to be about
losing that sale. Its about access. The audience is now bigger and
broader and more impatient than its ever been.
BlueLoop Concepts New Report Looks at
Digital Publishing Ventures
Among the trends, a huge global market
OCTOBER 2012
The DIGITAL SPOTLIGHT
BY CALVIN REID
FA_Frankfurt Fair Dealer Cover Wrap.indd 3 8/2/12 9:12 AM
FA_Frankfurt Fair Dealer Cover Wrap.indd 4 8/2/12 9:12 AM

También podría gustarte