Perseus Announces New “One-Stop” Digital Publishing Service

The Perseus Books Group, publisher and provider of sales, marketing and distribution services to independent publishers, announced this week the launch of a new digital publishing service called Constellation, which will enable independent publishers to offer their content in a variety of digital formats—including e-books, online content sampling services and digital files for print-on-demand—through a number of vendors. The service will be available to all independent publishers associated with The Perseus Books Group, including those owned by the group and joint-venture partners as well as those served by Consortium, Perseus Distribution and PGW.

The service already has partnership agreements in place with a number of technology companies, including Amazon (for the Kindle and “Search Inside the Book”), BookSurge, Sony, Google, OverDrive, Ebrary, BarnesandNoble.com (for “See Inside”), Lightning Source and Edwards Brothers (for digital printing). According to Perseus, additional partner announcements are anticipated.

Publishers can select which services, as well as which vendors, they want to use. Constellation negotiates agreements with these vendors on behalf of the publisher. Publishers then load print-ready PDFs to Constellation’s Web interface or provide them via a portable file transfer. (Constellation will also help with the digitization of files for publishers who don’t have them available.)

The Perseus Web site (http://www.perseusdigital.com/constellation/home.php) offers a detailed explanation of how Constellation works and what is required of publishers.

“Up until now, the full range of digital opportunities has been mostly confined to large corporate publishers owned by multinational corporations, and many independent publishers have been shut out,” says David Steinberger, Perseus president and CEO. “Constellation will level the playing field for independent publishers and make it possible to generate new revenues from ‘long tail’ content.”

“The Perseus Books Group is in a position to bring together independent publishers and create opportunities for us that would be much more difficult if we were on our own,” says Munro Magruder, associate publisher of New World Library, a PGW client.

Perseus COO Joe Mangan states in a letter posted on Perseus’ Web site: “This powerful technology- and vendor-agnostic service creates one, central repository and service organization that can help you manage your titles through their life cycle, leveraging—where appropriate—online marketing and sampling, e-book distribution and sales, short print run (short print runs to stock), and true print-on-demand (print only to order).”

North Plains is providing the digital asset management software to support Constellation. “As a company whose mission is to enable independent publishers to reach their potential, The Perseus Books Group is in a unique position to empower ‘long tail’ content owners to generate new revenues from the digital world,” says Hassan Kotob, president & CEO of North Plains.