Sparking an

e-book
revolution

Sameer Shariff
Founder & CEO
TOC 2009
Agenda
Trends & Challenges Case Studies of Success

Formulating your Strategy iPublishCentral

Who we are?
• From inception till 2008, Impelsys has powered more than
2000 projects for billion dollar publishers to small million
dollar publishers
• We have spent millions of dollars on our core technologies,
iPlatform, VirtualPages and iDAMS. We have built them
over the past 4 years and the technologies are serving
millions of readers worldwide.
• We launched iPublishCentral (ipublishcentral.com) as a
Software as a Service (SaaS) model leveraging our years of
experience. The goal is to bring down costs of delivery so
that any publisher can build an online strategy.
We serve 200+ publishers across geographies & segments.
Key takeaways from this presentation

Experiment Discoverability

Control Relationship
Trends
Trends in Reading
Reading and buying trends of
books not encouraging
3.2 % increase from 2006 with a compound growth
rate of 2.5 % per year since 2002

This increase, the highest in the last 26 years, is still

insignificant when compared to video games (19%)
and movies (5.3%)

(Source: AAP, http://www.publishers.org/main/IndustryStats/indStats_02.htm)

Trends in Reading

Availability of these different

types of media - vying for
reader's attention and
dollars
Trends in Reading

How do you get to understand

your customers?
The web is changing
consumption and your future
markets will change.
Web is changing reader behavior
Trend is towards searching
and foraging for information
Increased use of Google and
Wikipedia for reading and
research
Bits and pieces of information are
weaved together from multiple
sources like scent trails

(Source: Xerox PARC, http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/%7Eechi/papers/chi2000/scent.pdf)

Web is changing reader behavior
Is making content visible the
first step in the solution?

Will it provide a strong enough

“scent” for people to browse
and ultimately buy?

Google Book Search

Web is changing reader behavior

You must give the consumers

what they need/require

Provide content and

not “books”
 Search
Trends
The number of people searching
to know more about ebooks has
doubled in the last 4 years
according to google trends.

Source: Google Trends (http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm)

Reference Reader Trends
Do you prefer using online resources or print for your research, class presentation
and instruction? No. of respondents 831

1 in 2 people or around 50% prefer doing research reading online.

(Source: Global Faculty eBook Survey, 2007, February
(http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=wS8CU8W9N_2fIwRuMq5gNMsw_3d_3d)
Market trends

Source: IDPF Industry Statistics (http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm)

Consumer Expectation

Interactive: Participative:
audio, video, animations “I matter and so does my opinion”

Available:
Cost: Anywhere, Anytime
micro-payments

(source: www.idpf.org/events/presentations/Frankfurt08/FBF08_RandomHouseUK_Duggan.ppt - )
 Trends

Challenges
Challenges of going e

Multiple formats, hardware devices, software

Which one will win? What formats?
Challenges of going e

Cost and Risk

Cost of experimenting and risk of competition
Challenges of going e

Conversion costs
Tagging/Metadata (how deep?)
Time to Market
Challenges of going e

Challenges in depending on others

Who controls it?
Who is gaining insights into user behavior?
Who understands the market needs?
Who can develop products that meet these needs?
Success
Stories
Experiments:
World Bank
e-Library
Sparking an
e-book
revolution

Sameer Shariff
Founder & CEO
TOC 2009
Experiments: World Bank Results and Sales Contribution

Source: Channels for Online Publishing: The Experience of World Bank Publications, Valentina Kalk, 2008
(http://www.editoresmadrid.org/Seminario%20STM/Intervencion_Kalk_Valentina.pdf)
Experiments:
Harper Collins
Browse Inside
Harper Collins
launched their Browse
Inside program in 2006,
becoming one of the
first publisher to do so
It brings powerful features
that retail aggregators, like
Amazon, offer on their site
Amazon, who pioneered offering
samples on a large scale in
2003, reported about 9%
increase of print sales across
120,000 titles in 5 days after the
Search Inside capability was
available on their site
(
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_/ai
)

Experiments: Harper Collins Browse

Inside

Harper Collins had a similar experience with sales They were also able to
gain valuable insights into
Harper Collins reported print sales increase of 30% and 250% what the market wants
for specific titles using their Browse Inside functionality
(http://www.idpf.org/events/presentations/digitalbook08/lHulse08.pdf)
 Harper Collins Browse Inside
Browse Inside PDF Free Download

Visitors 83,102 20,000

Visits 85,867 30,000
Downloads 0 15,000
Page Views 3,827,306

Avg Page Views per Visit 46

Avg. Visit Duration 15:55

Clicks on Buy Link 1,177

Emailed to a Friend 16,236

(Source: Experiments with free digital content, presented at IDPF Digital Book 2008 by Leslie Hulse, VP Digital Business
Development, Harper Collins, http://www.idpf.org/events/presentations/digitalbook08/lHulse08.pdf)
Experiments:
Random House
Beyond EBooks
 Random House Beyond EBooks

Along with their own book preview program, called “Browse & Search”, Random
House is also looking beyond ebooks and now offers Personalized Books,
Chunked Content (for $2.99 for each chapter), Custom Content Selections and Ad
supported content

(Source: IDPF Digital Book 2008: Random House Update, Matt Shatz, 2008,
www.openebook.org/events/presentations/digitalbook08/mShatz.pdf)
 Experiments: Random House Beyond
EBooks

2,824,527 184,444 254, 383

Book Pages Viewed People who have viewed a widget Number of widgets viewed

Random House has effectively increased page views and in

turn the popularity of their content by being visible

(Source: Matt Shatz, IDPF Digital Book2007,

http://www.idpf.org/events/presentations/digitalbook07/Matt%20Shatz%20-%20Random%20House.pdf)
Experiments:
O’Reilly Safari
and Beyond
O'Reilly Media has been at the
forefront in experimenting with
different models of electronic
delivery
Offering a NetFlix-like model of
lending books, it remains DRM
free offering as many prints and
copies a subscriber wants to make
Started in 2001 as a web based
subscription model, it is now the #2
channel behind Amazon for O'Reilly
in sales
(Source:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/competition-in-the-ebook-marke.html
)
Experiments: o’Reilly Safari and Beyond
They also experimented with
various tools like SafariU that
allowed custom mash-up
publishing of books for
University professors
O'Reilly now offers books They service various channels
in PDF, Mobi and ePUB like Kindle, iPhone and Stanza
formats as direct
downloads

Experiments: o’Reilly Safari and Beyond

This has resulted in a strong market expansion strategy

where O'Reilly now meets the needs of all types of
customers
Formulating
your
strategy
 Why should you experiment?

• Others are doing it, so should

you
• Run your own program, along
with other existing strategies – it
does not hurt
• It helps in gaining visibility and
establishing a relationship with
your readers
• The world is changing and you
can leverage this change
• Your networks are your future
currency
 Increase Visiblity
• Increase visibility by being
available where your
readers are
• Be relevant and useful
• Introduce your books and
create brand awareness
• Increase page views to gain
SEO and SEM
• Get insight into what your
readers are doing
• Offer value to potentially
increase sales
 Establish Relationships
• Relationships matter
• Listen, understand and
respond
• Own your readers and their
mind share
• Reach out to readers with
news and updates
• Word-of-Mouth works and
social media is the easiest
way to get it started
• Targeted marketing is better
than broadcast advertising
 Control
• Who controls these
relationships?
• Is it sufficient to have
retailers like Amazon and
search engines like
Google manage them?
• How do you build your
infrastructure for the
future - the investment
does not have to be great
Introducing iPublishCentral
• iPublishCentral is low-cost and low-
risk Software as a Service (SaaS)
focussed on publishing
• It helps publishers to formulate, run
and control their own E-Strategy
• The vision of iPublishCentral is to
help publishers through a self-serve
model to market, distribute and
deliver content online
• Launched during Frankfurt Book
Fair 2008, we currently have more
than 150 publishers on it
• It helps publishers convert capital
expenditure plans to revenue
expenditure – with a pay-as-you-go
model
• It takes away the need for up-front
investments in installations,
operations, support, maintenance and
training
• Automated content workflow and
ready-to-go functionality offers zero-
conversion costs and quicker time to
market
• Fully backed with a SLA
• It's entirely self service, but for
publishers short on time and resources
– support on a T&M basis
Widgets
Portals
Key takeaways from this presentation

Experiment Discoverability

Control Relationship
Thank You
To see how ipublishcentral can make a
difference to your business, sign up at
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