Really Strategies Blog

Content management for publishers---staying ahead of the digital revolution

The Gilbane Group's "Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing" illustrates some projections for e-book revenue over the next 5 years.When asked about the percentage of gross revenue that e-book activities generated at their company, survey respondents indicated that the majority of book publishers see less than 5% of gross revenues from e-books. In contrast, expected revenue from e-book efforts in 5 years’ time runs high, with the majority of book publishers expecting 15% or higher of gross revenues to come from e-books:

  

Do you have a plan to stay ahead of the digital revolution?

 Download your free copy of this report today > click here.

http://gilbane.com/

The Kindle revenue bump

Good news for publishers delivering to Kindle---in December, Amazon will increase the revenue split so that publishers can earn 70 percent of the retail price for each issue sold in the Kindle Store, minus delivery costs. That’s a reversal from Amazon keeping as much as 70 percent of retail revenues.

Read the full story here.

A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation | a report from the Gilbane Group

Over the next few weeks, we're sharing snippets from "A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing" by the Gilbane Group, a division of Outsell, Inc. The report truly is a must-read for book publishers but other types of publishers will also gain value from the trends and research the study has collected.

Today, we share the overview from the report:

It truly is a whole new world for book publishing. Publishers know this of course, as do their partners, vendors, and, of course, their booksellers. There are the obvious signs – the Kindles you see in friends’ hands and on the subway and the lines at the Apple store when the iPad was introduced. For industry observers, there are also the daily headlines about Google, Sony, Apple, and Amazon. PW Daily, the Monday-Friday e-mail blast from Publishers Weekly has e-book-related articles in almost every edition; we have counted more than one edition in the past year where every article was about e-books.

After the devastating economy of late 2008 and early 2009, book publishers are seeing more numbers that are positive. The revenues for digital publishing – and e-books specifically – are very strong and promise to continue to grow. Some segments of book publishing, including STM (scientific, technical, and medical) and professional, reached the digital revenue tipping point long ago. Some research from our Outsell colleagues, summarized later in this report, suggest other segments will start to tip in the next year or two.

These larger forces are creating significant pressure inside of book publishing. The goal of this study was to look at how publishers are adapting their traditional processes – many decades old and older – to adapt to digital publishing. Since these processes are usually aided by technology, the study took aim at the tools and systems publishers have been using and are starting to use.
The excitement of the marketplace is tempered by some of our analysis. While there are many bright spots – production and digital printing jump to mind – other process areas lag, are too nascent, or are waiting for industry standards and best practices to coalesce. What makes the landscape particularly challenging for book publishers is the rapid-fire addition of new channels and business models and the need to codify these models in their internal processes and systems even before they can fully evaluate how valuable some of these channels and models are.

Still the big picture for book publishers is very positive. The revenues are there, and growing. Readers are excited by the new devices and are demonstrating their excitement in fast-growing device and e-book sales. Publishers are moving ahead quickly across a broad front of process improvement and technology investment.

Our case studies point to some of the smartest bets publishers can make in the near- and medium-term. We expect that a look at these process areas in another year would show steady improvement in most areas and marked improvement in those areas tied most directly to revenue growth and e-book promotion.

Stay tuned for more information from this report or download your own copy here.

A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation

The Gilbane Group's web-based survey of book publishing professionals has just gone live.

The survey is one of the research mechanisms for Gilbane's upcoming study: A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing.

The survey takes about 10-to-15 minutes to complete and seeks to gain a clearer picture of ebook and related digital publishing efforts underway among the full spectrum of book publishers.

All participants will have full access to the full-length study, which will be published in June.

This survey is for high- and mid-level book publishing professionals.

Waiting in [the virtual] line for your eBook

Simon and Schuster and Hachette recently announced that their eBook offering will only be available after the hardcover book has been on the market but prior to the paperback hitting book stores.  The Wall Street Journal reported on this recently and the article can be found here.

Once again we have a business model that is in direct conflict with what the consumer wants. Do you remember not all that long ago the issues in the music industry around buying a single song versus an entire album on-line?  This smells suspiciously similar and the consumer is the one losing out.

I completely understand the challenges publishers face regarding the price disparity between hardcover and electronic formats, but postponing the inevitable is not a customer focused organization.  Why not embrace the new business model and become the best eBook publisher?  That is easier said than done when an entire industry is setup for publishing and distribution of a physical book.

It remains to be seen the next step in this business model, but for now, get in the virtual line and wait your turn to purchase that eBook.

The eBook Challenge

Yes, it looks and sounds like a fun new game but it's actually quite a confusing landscape. And the image depicted here is a simplified version of starting points, formats, stores, readers, devices and their loose connections.

I'm still catching up from last week's Tools of Change for Publishing conference where the big takeaway was 2009 is the year of the ebook.

What I want to know is are publishers prepared? Which ebook format is best for you? Do you distribute to all devices or just one? How do ebooks fit into your multi-channel publishing workflow?

I can hardly wait for 2010 to see who comes out the winner. Stay tuned.

RSuite CMS provides loud and clear answer for Audible.com

We are often asked by publishers to describe the real business impact RSuite CMS has on our clients. Along with my previous post on Blood-Horse Publications, Audible.com is another client that has leveraged the power of RSuite to realize its business goals.

Audible, Inc., an Amazon.com, Inc. subsidiary, is the leading provider of premium digital spoken audio information and entertainment, on the Internet.

In early 2007 Audible.com launched an aggressive project to revamp their entire metadata program to better manage and process the metadata files they receive from their publishing partners.This program had the following business objectives to meet:

• Ensure error-free metadata by using publisher or publisher aggregators as the source of data, and by developing new tools to drive, search, browse, and publish to store functions off this sourced data.
• Ensure the ability to identify Audible products on partner sites by providing ISBNs that correspond to the downloadable digital binding with each product in feeds to partners, wherever and whenever possible.
• Reduce the occurrences of human error by automatically populating data into web site databases, from the sourced data.
• Improve findabilty, searchability, and marketability of products by standardizing keyword, category, authors, contributors, and publishers.
• Improve royalty systems by making contract entry a requirement for any product being pushed to an Audible site.

During a 4-week proof of concept (POC), RSuite was configured to prove out several use cases:

1. Leverage RSuite’s workflow tool to ingest ONIX feeds and audio files
2. Apply additional metadata (both manually and automatically)
3. Distribute the appropriate content packages to target delivery sites.

During this stage many business rules were also documented that were applicable to improving Audible's business opportunities. After a successful POC, Audible.com selected RSuite for its metadata and aggregation solution.

RSuite became the framework upon which Audible crafted solutions to meet all its requirements: workflow, business rules validation, content aggregation and delivery. In 6 months, RSuite was configured and implemented to become Audible's workflow tool, which enables seamless transfer of content from publisher feeds to web site-ready files.

Now after using RSuite for over a year, Audible has realized its goals of integrating a tool that would satisfy the business objectives and show a return on investment quickly. As Art Zegarek, director of data architecture told our team, “RSuite has become a very critical system very fast!" It is satisfying to know that RSuite is helping an aggregator such as Audible.com meet its business objectives every day.