HarperCollins to Launch Online Sales Catalog

By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 5/12/2008 2:01:00 PM

HarperCollins is developing an interactive, electronic sales catalog. The catalog will offer booksellers an online tool to order books and reduce Harper’ paper output. Harper will preview the catalog at BEA later this month and will launch a beta version in six to 12 months. Harper spokesperson Erin Crum said the catalog will start with the summer 2009 list. The house will distribute a limited number of print copies as well.

The catalog will feature book covers, prices, on-sale dates, reviews and quotes, and media alerts will be updated in real time. The pages will also include links to author interviews, promotional videos and audio samples for some titles. Booksellers will be able to create lists and place orders online. Authors’ backlists will also be available.

Jane Friedman, Harper president and CEO, said, “It has been clear to me for some time that catalogs are out of date as soon as they are printed. So much of what we do today is in real time. Why not our catalogs? In addition, an electronic version reduces a tremendous amount of waste in all areas, paper, production and shipping. ”

BISG Making Information Pay 2008

I was fortunate enough to attend this year's BISG conference, and will share some highlights:

1. The theme of the conference was experimentation.
2. BISG survey showed that non-trade publishers, more than their trade counterparts, believe that experimentation is important; however, the trade ones believe they experiment more than their non-trade counterparts.
3. Author and Dr. Michael E. Raynor spoke about strategy and innovation. He pointed out that upper management tends to have more uncertainty and experimentation, whereas lower management, to succeed at their tasks, need to be certain and committed.
4. Carolyn Pittis, Senior VP of Global Marketing Strategy and Operations at HarperCollins, discussed innovations that HarperCollins has implemented on a global scale. For example, their UK office launched a preteen website based around a series character; while HC books are included, they are only included and advertised contextually: the focus of the website is more community-driven than sales-driven. HarperCollins has also helped their authors--and themselves--by making it very easy for their authors to create personal websites and they offer a "search inside" feature on their website, which has increased sales and traffic.
5. Michael Cader spoke about his success with Publisher's Lunch and Marketplace, which is due to iteration and constantly adapting their offerings based on what their customers wanted and/or needed, and doing so in a way that kept overhead and costs down. To him, "innovation is iteration."
6. Todd Anderson, Director of the University of Alberta Bookstore, spoke about their experience with POD and how, as soon as their store got the Espresso Book Machine and it became known to the public, they were inundated with POD requests of all sorts. He also showed a funny video: they had been lucky to have the machine work perfectly each time media came to visit, except this once when the camera showed an error that Todd and the reporter didn't notice until the cameraman pointed it out to them.
7. The Innovator's roundtable included Malle Vallik from Harlequin, Gwen Jones from John Wiley & Sons, Neil DeYoung from Hachette Book Group USA, and Julie Grau from Random House.

Overall, as Carolyn Pittis said at the end, it is warming to see how far and fast publishers have been able to adapt to the ever-changing world of media with innovation and experimentation.

Think Digital and Get Accessible for Free

Today brought news of the release of a "Save to Daisy" add-in for Microsoft Word, and while a new Word add-in wouldn't normally be news for publishers, there's a bit more to this story.

Among the benefits of distributing content digitally is that it ostensibly makes the content more accessible to alternate reading devices. It's not difficult to see how -- compared to a printed page -- text marked up for computers to read (think HTML) would be much easier for a computer to read to a human (like Braille readers or text-to-speech). Indeed, for some time now we've offered audio versions of many O'Reilly articles and blogs (including this one). But in reality, format diffusion and DRM has often frustrated accessibility efforts (and by extension, consumers).

The industry migration toward EPUB has the potential to address this -- any (non-DRM) EPUB file should in theory be readable by a variety of accessibility devices, with no added conversion cost or delay.

But first there's a shift that needs to happen, and that's a shift on the part of publishers from building books primarily intended to be consumed in print to building books that are intended to be consumed digitally. When we first learned of the "Export to EPUB" feature in InDesign, there was premature optimism internally that it was the answer to a lot of questions about how to present some of our most popular content in a more digital-friendly form. The reality though is that simply exporting EPUB from InDesign files designed for print created essentially useless output. Our contacts at Adobe helped clarify that a huge part of getting good EPUB out of InDesign is about designing the content with that format in mind -- something very few designers are doing yet that I'm aware of. There's a serious education issue here, in that most people who hear that InDesign can export to EPUB assume it's as easy as "Save as..." and it's not. For example:

... when threading together text fields, they will always be exported in the correct order. However, they will also always be in one flow. All of the layout editing that you have done to place the text boxes with respect to each other or the page is discarded. You will have to style the layout of the EPUB manually, after export.

There's growing inertia behind EPUB (I like to refer to it as the "mp3 of ebooks"), and when ebooks become a primary delivery format, rather than a secondary one, expect to see much more content available in an inherently accessible way. Here's hoping the next version of Word includes "Save as EPUB" from the start. (For now you can try the free DAISY pipeline to convert those exported DAISY Word files into EPUB.)

Transition: Print to Online

Many publishers (myself included) have made the transition from print orientation to web and seen their business and not least their revenue model completely transform. I've refered to this as the 'valley of death' which is what the top line can look like as you make this transition and others have referred to it as "trading dollars for dimes". Industry luminaries such as
Tim O'Reilly have noted some fundamental problems in trading subscription and print based ad models for web only ad models: Basically the numbers can fail to add up. (Read the article and follow some of the links).

There are some success stories and there are likely to be more as publishers willingly and generally otherwise, look to the web for revenue growth. The NYTimes discusses how magazine publisher International Data Group which is the biggest publisher of technology magazines has successfully made this transition. From the article:

Advertisers and readers of high-tech publications have moved online more swiftly than other audiences, so I.D.G. may offer a glimpse of the future of publishing. Yet the transition at I.D.G. came only after years of investment, upheaval and changes in its practice of journalism. “The excellent thing, and good news, for publishers is that there is life after print — in fact, a better life after print,” said Patrick J. McGovern, the founder and chairman of I.D.G.

The article goes on to note that InfoWorld is now generating ad revenue of $1.6mm per month with an operating margin of 37% whereas the combination print and web product of a year ago was a break-even operation. Since their market is technology they have some advantage over other types of magazines; however, their navigation of this transition is instructive and predictive of the manner in which publishers will ultimately become successful.

In IDG's case they have remained faithful to the mission of providing content their core market wants, aggressively managing the performance of their titles and shutting down those that don't perform and they have combined staff into cohesive and focused groups. Companies that make this transition early and successfully will establish difficult to surmount positions relative to their competitors; thus it becomes harder for the second, third and fourth players to garner the ad revenue and secure transaction revenues and fees necessary to become successful.

Borders Faces the Future Head-on

Several months ago I read an article that Borders and Wiley were going to work together to bring travel kiosks into their stores. These "Trip Recommenders" would help you choose destinations, offer suggested resources, and even allow you to book travel plans right from the Borders store. I remember how impressed I was about this innovative idea and partnership.

Well, Borders hasn't stopped there. Apparently, as Joe Wilkert reported in his blog several days ago, they are changing the way they organize their stores and display books.

Borders Concept Store Opens in Central Indiana

Today was opening day for the new Borders concept store in Fishers, Indiana. Technically speaking, the store is located in Noblesville, but it's so darned close to my house that I'll be referring to it as "the Fishers Borders." As an admitted book nerd I couldn't avoid visiting the store over lunch today.

If you missed this earlier post, Borders is in the process of opening a series of new outlets with more of a high-tech feel. The first thing I noticed when entering the Fishers store wasn't so much the technology kiosks as it was the dramatically improved book merchandising approach. Like most stores, bestsellers are on a variety of front-of-store displays; but this particular layout seemed to be much more open and inviting, not just a rack of face-out titles.

The tech kiosks are all clustered together in an area that's nicely set off from the books and CDs/DVDs. You'll find stations where you can buy customized CDs, research genealogy (and buy a book about your family name), get help with your digital camera/music player or explore the world of self-publishing with Borders partner Lulu. They've also set up a special website to help support these new concept stores, which you can find here.

Borders also recently announced plans to focus more on bestsellers and face-out displays. The change is noticeable in the Fishers store, and I mean that in a good way. Even though the store's footprint is on the smaller side and they're clearly carrying less titles than the typical superstore, the browsing experience felt different from what I've come to expect in the typical big-box store. In other words, I liked it quite a bit and plan to visit it regularly.

P.S. -- For those of you in central Indiana, even though the store is already open, the "official grand opening" is slated for the weekend of May 9-11. According to the brochure I picked up today there will be several author signings, demos and other great reasons to stop by for the grand opening festivities.

Perhaps with innovation such as Borders is demonstrating, bookstores need not become fewer but instead can evolve and offer services that the Web cannot.

Social Marketing

TheLadder.com, a job site for 100K plus professionals, has a few interesting YouTube videos.

So shoes can be sold via Twitter, job recruiting via YouTube...how can publishers best utilize Web 2.0 social media?

Twitter and Online Branding

Twitter is all about users answering one question: What are you doing now?

I had heard about if for a while, but wasn't tempted since Facebook status updates kept me and my friends plenty informed. Then today I read an article about protecting your online brand and it suggested registering your name on several social media sites, including Twitter.

So off I went into the heretofore unchartered: Twitter, Technorati, WordPress, MyBlogLog. I found all of these interesting but nothing special.

Then tonight I saw this on one of my Google alerts:

What's more stereotypically trivial than shoe shopping? Using Twitter, of course! Online shoe retailer Zappos does shoes and social media remarkably well. Scores of bloggers, lots of video blogging and 198 employees on Twitter help keep the company's profile high and humanize the folks behind the shoe sales.

Of all the different types of social media the company uses, none are as interesting as its use of Twitter. Twitter may sound cliche, but it's not just about Twitter as one single service. Twitter is symbolic of rapid, short, synchronous and public conversations. Zappos has bitten off a big chunk of that paradigm.

This article illuminates exactly how powerful social media can be and to what extent Twitter and the others can influence not only where we spend our time, but also where we spend our money.