In the past three years, the arrival of eBooks has transformed publishing as completely as a flood in the desert. The new landscape can look deceptively homogenous: eBooks, eBooks, everywhere—right? Frustratingly, myriad eBook creation technologies and file types make for a turbulent sea of solutions and strategies. But if you study those who have gone before, you can learn from the wrecks and glories of others and can navigate successfully to a new world for your content.
In this presentation, we look at some of the successes and mis-directions in the new field of eBook solutions to help you think about the best approach to choosing an eBook solution for your business.
There are three big lessons to remember to help guide your strategy:
- Not re-creation — re-imagination. You shouldn’t just reproduce your content for mobile; you should reconfigure and reimagine it for how the user will experience it on a handheld device.
- Find your audience. Figure out where your audience is engaging with your content—and where they gather. Then deliver them ebooks, apps, websites, or even just emails in the place where they’re most likely to engage.
- Scale Quality. One-offs are great for some situations, but it’s a lot harder to build a “Cruise Ship” app than it is to build many eBook “yachts” that ship quickly and can keep you ahead of trends. But you have to remember: when you scale, you must have quality. You must scale quality.
Some examples:
Icebergs: Vook and the “Medical Company”: How a tasty looking business deal became overly complicated; i.e., eBooks aren’t the ultimate solution for everyone—they’re often part of a larger whole.
The NorthWest Passage: O’Reilly Figures It Out: O’Reilly developed an eBook strategy that encompassed delivery to a diverse variety of mobile devices, platforms, and audience expectation and were able to launch a very successful eBook publishing program for its content in multiple formats, both complicated and straightforward.
Cruise Ships: Workman and Apps: When Masterpiece Cruise Ship Apps Work for Complicated Content: Workman had struggled with turning its richly laid out book content into digital—until it hit on the perfect strategy for its title 1,000 Places To See Before You Die, which successfully integrated the print and digital versions of its title.
Great White Sharks: … and When Masterpiece Apps Turn Into Monsters: Sometimes spending a lot of money leaves you with a beautiful app, but also with a program that can’t successfully scale. Examples include the Conde Nast app brouhaha, where the complicated Adobe apps aren’t producing the results Conde Nast is looking for.
Yachts: The WSJ, NYTimes and Vanity Fair—Shipping eBooks Fast: Newspaper and television and media companies are the future of digital book publishing. In 2012, anyone who has a website and traffic can become a digital book publisher. Here’s what they’re doing right.
The Narrows: Hanley Wood Works with Complicated Content: B2B publisher Hanley Wood had a very successful web program called “Cost vs. Value” that was part of the subscription for their magazine Remodeler. The web program analyzed the return remodeling efforts can deliver to homeowners on resale. Hanley Wood pursued the traditional channel of producing a PDF based magazine for Remodeler through R.R. Donnelly, but they couldn’t fit this feature into that approach. So they spun it off into a separate app called Cost Vs. Value, which let users check the cost vs. value of remodeling while mobile. They figured out where their readers lived and delivered value to them on the go.
RadioMan: How Tasting Table Used eBooks to Turn Emails into Books: Daily email company Tasting Table is using eBooks in an innovative way to transform its content type—cooking culture—into eBooks, using Apple’s fixed-layout solution. But TT isn’t just publishing any eBooks—they’re publishing fixed-layout, one-off, complicated books—and only releasing them through iBooks. What to most publishers may seem like a limited window, TT exploits because the goal isn’t to drive revenue through sales, but awareness. So they made their eBook free on iBooks, and picked up big, powerful download numbers, thereby increasing user engagement.
