As the publishing industry looks to experiment and expand into new areas of digital media, we take a look at some of the big names, some old, some new, which have established themselves in the e-singles market over the last few years. We ask what the options are for smaller independent platforms and start-ups, and what role partnerships and acquisitions will play in the coming months.

Kindle Singles

A store within a store, Amazon’s Kindle Singles is a platform wrapped up in the Amazon behemoth. It offers a curated selection of e-singles from a number of publishers and also acts as a small, in-house publishing brand. The baby of David Blum, the Kindle Singles editor, it picks content from thousands of unsolicited manuscripts, edits, designs cover art and publishes them very quickly. For the author, Amazon pays nothing up front and keeps 30% of all sales; however, it provides a reliable audience with purchasing power, allows authors a share in the profit rather than a flat fee and facilitates quick publishing and global distribution. In an interview with the New York Times Blum said, “The idea that writers would participate in the publishing model is very bold.” In terms of the stores profitability, Amazon has indicated that over five million singles have been sold since its launch in 2011 and as the e-single arena of 2011 was a somewhat less crowded literary market place, met little resistance. The tight editorial control over what gets published is having a positive effect on Kindle Singles literary standing with other industry leaders.  Evan Ratliff, chief executive and co-founder of Atavist has said “They actually make a concerted effort to find something great,” adding, “while we might disagree on the specifics of what that is, our overall sensibilities are aligned.”

Apple’s Quickreads

Launched in 2011, in what many believe to be a response to the Kindle Singles store, Apple’s Quickreads became the go to location for iBook Store users. Featuring much the same types of content as other e-singles platforms, Quickreads leverages the strength of Apple’s online and offline presence, with the ability to deliver content through an already established network of hardware.  The flexibility of the iBook Store and the painless transfer of content between iPads and iPhones give Quickreads enviable distribution avenues. But while the Kindle Singles Store behaves more like a traditional publisher of content, Apple Quickreads can feel a little less curated.

Start-ups

Examples of e-single start-ups are plentiful right now, with the likes of Byliner, The Atavist and Read Petit to name a few, going from strength to strength. Byliner, an e-singles startup, recently partnered with the New York Times and Esquire on new e-single ventures for long form journalism and is experimenting with new subscription programs. The Atavist, a multimedia publishing group partnered with Barry Diller and Scott Rudin, are working on the launch of their own e-single focused publisher ‘Brightline’ as well as making inroads with in-app subscriptions. Read Petite has been referred to as ‘the new Spotify for short stories’ and with backing from Waterstones Founder Tim Waterstone, many believe the platform will perform well. Offering a highly curated collection of short stories and longer articles for a monthly fee, Read Petit’s subscription model is drawing comparisons with Spotify’s streaming service, but with an emphasis on quality over quantity, Waterstone told the Guardian “The whole point is to avoid the slush pile of material. What we’ll guarantee is quality writing”.

The Atlantic

Most recently, The Atlantic announced that they are launching a new line of ebooks that will include “original long-form pieces between 10,000 and 30,000 words, and curated archival collections that span the magazine’s 155-year history and feature some of the best-loved voices in American letters.” The new focus on e-singles for Atlantic puts them in direct competition with The Atavist, Byliner and Read Petit and it will be interesting to see how the growing number of players in the e-single market effects the area. Up to this point, e-singles have been natively digital; however, with the recent partnership between Byliner and Ingram set to produce e-shorts in print, longform publishing could go full circle. With the main driving point behind the venture being readers wanting physical versions of Byliner stories, the benefits to the format in the long term remains to be seen.

As the demand for easily consumable content looks set to continue to grow, the future of the e-single looks safe. Authors and journalists look to close the gap between themselves and readers as well as move towards more digital forms of distribution. The e-single format provides a short, snappy burst of topical content and a popular form of information digestion in an ever increasingly online world. While they may not drive much in terms of revenue, they are cheap to produce and popular among authors and readers, with some calling them the ‘format of our time’.

The number of people who read an e-book over the past year soared from 16% in late 2011 to 23%. Meanwhile, the number of Americans who purported to have read a printed book dropped from 72% to 67%.

The survey’s most drastic result illustrated the infiltration of ereading devices and tablets into households. 33% of participants owned either a tablet computer or an ebook reading device – a sharp increase from 18% in late 2011. The percentage of people who own a ebook reading device has spiked from 10% to 19%, while computer tablets have fared even better, jumping from 10% to 25%.

The survey also focused on elending and public libraries. The results demonstrate a growing awareness that public libraries lend ebooks. However, the numbers are still low – over half the participants were unaware whether their local library has an ebook lending program.

Whether these positive results for ebooks will in turn cause a spike in reading overall has yet to be seen. Although the number of overall readers in fact decreased from 2011, the difference was so small that the report deems it a statically insignificant drop. The question remains whether ebooks will attract those who would not have otherwise read a print book, not simply convert established readers from print to digital.

The report is a project of the Pew Research Center’s American Life Project. Along with the figures above, it provides detailed breakdowns of both ebook readers and readers in general along multiple demographic lines. It is available to read here: http://libraries.pewinternet.org/files/legacy-pdf/PIP_Reading%20and%20ebooks_12.27.pdf

How far has technology challenged the pure content business? Examples of successful online communities and multi-platform brands (Top Gear, Pottermore) were showcased over the course of the digital seminars at the fair. The importance of digital marketing tools like Mouseflow and Google Analytics was stressed by all (Puffin, Oxford Scholarly Editions Online).

Speakers from Macmillan claimed that focus in publishing was no longer on content but generating and implementing digital solutions. Dominic Knight called for ‘moving beyond content’ while Stephen Devlin predicted that the product owner would be either equally or more important than the editor.

Marketing professionals from BBC Worldwide and Penguin showcased a plethora of publishing solutions ranging from apps (both content-based and games) and online communities to user statistics, analytics and semantic tagging. As marketers, they measured the ‘story’ in how well it created an emotional gateway to the brand. Their focus remained on the latest publishing solutions in which to commit their digital content. Laurie Kaye, lawyer behind Pottermore, heralded an IP-centric, platform-agnostic publishing paradigm.

A pressing need to invest time, staff, money and forward-thinking into technology and publishing solutions trumped all other concerns discussed over the seminars (I attended) at the fair. The most insightful and incisive publishers were in the process of bolstering the organisation from within by implementing strong technology leadership. The lesson from the London Book Fair was clear: the pure content business has been toppled; substance is nothing without publishing solutions that will give it a fighting chance in the current publishing arena.

While it would not be entirely helpful to compare the apples of US ebook sales with the oranges of UK print book sales these statistics can lead a discussion as to what deeper factors are changing the book market:-

Bigger Overall Markets = Slower growth

Industry doomwatchers have already heralded the slowdown in ebook sales in the US as a signal that the years of growth are drawing quickly to a halt. Yet the slowing pace of growth is much more likely to be a function of ereading becoming a mass-market activity. The enormous growth figures of 2010 and 2011 are both arguably attributable to ebook sales growing quickly from a small base, as advances in technology made it easier to read books by smartphones and tablets as well as dedicated e-readers. As ebooks now account for more than 20% of overall book sales in the US, however, we will naturally see the rate of ebook sales growth slow.

Self-publishing is a substantial but under-reported part of the book market

The AAP’s figures are based on data provided by 1,193 of its members, the majority of which are conventional book publishers. What its figures do not include therefore is a picture of how self-publishing is impacting the book market. This could mean that the AAP is missing a substantial amount of ebook sales as, according to recent estimates self-published works account for 25% of sales on the Barnes and Noble Nook platform. If these figures are anyway near the same for Kobo and Kindle, both of which have directed substantial investment into their own self-publishing programmes, then it’s possible that the ebook market is an iceberg – much bigger than it appears on the surface.

Print and electronic discounts are separate, not equal

In recent years the majority of scrutiny on price promotions in publishing has been focused on ereading, with Sony’s controversial decision to discount selected ebooks to 20p in its UK store grabbing significant attention. Nielsen Bookscan’s data for the UK, however, highlights the role that steep discounting continues to play in driving volume sales in the print sector, singling out a £2.95 offer on Marian Keyes’ The Mystery of Mercy Close in British supermarket Tesco  as the principal reason behind the book shifting 20,000 copies.

The interesting contrast that this draws between the electronic and print book market is that with physical book sales it is still possible to ringfence a retailer-exclusive price promotion. Were the same promotion to be applied to the ebook version of the same title we would have seen the same price replicated across multiple platforms, as we saw when Kindle and iBooks rushed to match Sony’s 20p discounts last year.

Publishers grappled with the advantages and disadvantages of the two OA models outlined in the report. Gold Open Access is financed at the beginning of the process by charging the author (who is often backed by a research grant or institutional funds) an ‘article processing charge’ for publication rather than obtaining income from readers via subscriptions. In Green Open Access repositories (such as PubMed central) provide access to journals for free public use, subject to an embargo period. Repositories can belong to a discipline or an institution.

OA advocates attest that tax-payer funded research should be available to all. Moreover, open models would enhance accountability and public engagement with research, ensure improved efficiency in the research process itself and create closer links between research and innovation.

On the other side of the fence, many have rallied against OA. Firstly, there is the issue of low financial returns for IP-owners. Others are concerned that OA incentivises the infiltration of lower quality material – this would perhaps lead to a more difficult research experience the rise of importance in ‘brand’ journals. The peer-review system could be threatened. OA must be a global endeavour as the UK produces only a small percentage of the world’s research papers; there are limits to what it can achieve without international collaboration.

At the fair, these tensions were acknowledged and contested. All agreed that OA must focus on being author-facing as the array of gnarly creative commons licences are at best, unfriendly, and at worst could lead to IP-owners being exploited and/or restricted. The importance of working with all stakeholders for authors is imperative.

The debate surrounding the ethics, economics and reliability of OA will continue. Major funding agencies like the Wellcome Trust and National Institutes of Health have mandated it; whether this will be followed up in the future on a larger or more global scale waits to be seen.

This week we’re looking at online communities in practice. At their best, publisher online communities combine the interactive elements of modern gaming, the principles of social media and the community spirit of online forums. They are engaging and immersive platforms built around specific interests and are bringing publisher and reader interactions to new heights. These are just five examples of well conceived and executed projects that have created communities around a series of books, publishing imprint and even individual authors.

1. Pottermore

The Harry Potter inspired social network, Pottermore, brings new reading experiences to the fans of the series through curated ‘moments’ from the books. With new and exclusive content created by author JK Rowling specifically for the site, the Harry Potter community are given extensive insight into the deeper narrative of the characters, locations and history of the HP world. Aimed mainly at children, the site appeals through simple social media-like games, allowing users to brew potions, practice spells, collect house points and take part in wizard’s duels to unlock exclusive content. The site’s success lies in its understanding of the book’s primary audience, giving children the opportunity to become their own characters with their own roles within the story. The author’s partnership with Sony has allowed Pottermore to extend beyond the browser, with 3D mini games available on the PlayStation Home Network. 

2. Osprey Publishing

Specialising in military publishing, Osprey utilise the abundant opinions of their readers to inform commissioning options on new military & historical texts. Over the last few years they have successfully cultivated a community around the discussion of potential new titles. Taking reader demand into account, Osprey has put a high level of importance on publisher/reader relations, taking on a more symbiotic approach to commissioning.

3. Shanda

Shanda Interactive is a Chinese online book and games publisher that have built up a thriving community around episodic book instalments from over 800,000 writers. The model of Shanda Literature, allows readers to read the first few chapters of a novel for free before introducing micro payments for further chapters. It provides a platform for aspiring writers to build up a fan base, and, if popular, can propel them to huge success. Successful authors also use the site to gauge public opinion before going to print with new novels. The Shanda Network operates through three known portals, each targeting different types of readers with different types of content and controls over 90% of China’s online reading market with the majority of content falling between the science fiction and fantasy genres.

4. SF Gateway

For publishers, the main goal of online communities is to build and maintain an interest around a particular imprint, genre or book series. Orion Publishing’s SF Gateway exists as a sister imprint to Gollancz and focuses on science fictions past publications. The site acts as a platform for readers with a passion for classic SF to discuss and recommend authors within the genre. The forum is a prime example of a publisher managing a mini social network with repeating blog posts ‘SF Master Work of the week’ and ‘SF Gateway Readers Choice’ creating talking points within the community and embedding engagement throughout the project.

5. Mills & Boon

The Mills & Boon community pages feature highlighted discussions that encourage ‘Romance HQ’ and M&B readers to share stories, advice and questions on love and life. Every member has their own personal blog, and the option to log their own book reviews. The forum has a number of competitions including ‘The Book Challenge’ where readers log Mills & Boon novels they have read. These facilities are supported by fully customisable user profiles, enhancing the sense of a real world community, online

Online communities often carry their own unique structures; platforms built around a particular interest and designed to appeal to a specific group of like-minded individuals. While the outlets are often different, the aims remain the same. Publishers support for online communities is now at the forefront of their transformation into consumer facing organisations.

Perhaps the most significant advantage of online communities to publishers is that they’re a potential fount of customer knowledge and intelligence. And provided a publisher can apply the right analytics to this data, then at last the world of publishing can get access to some hard metrics on the effectiveness of their sales and marketing activities.

What was missing from this picture, however, were some hard facts as to the real uptake of online communities among trade and academic publishers. How far had they really penetrated into the publishing sector, and how did publishers really view them? Were they an exercise in gathering data, or a sales channel of burgeoning importance in their own right?

With this in mind we commissioned Bowker Market Research (BMR) to conduct a study into publishers’ use of online communities. This research was unveiled at an event at The London Book Fair. It revealed that publishers on both sides of the Atlantic had bought wholeheartedly into online communities, with their number expected to double by 2015.

Overall two thirds of trade and academic publishers surveyed by BMR already hosted online communities today, with that number expected to rise to over 90% in the next two years. A quarter expect to have seven or more networks up and running by 2015, with many respondents predicting a huge growth in the number of online communities for their company, from a current average of 2.1, to more than five over the next two years.

The survey revealed that trade publishers are currently most engaged in this area with 86% of respondents owning an online community in some shape or form.

The study also investigated the rationale and perceived benefits for publishers moving into this arena, revealing that:

• 84% of publishers felt their spending on online communities would increase in the next two years with only 14% envisaging expenditure remaining stagnant
• 64% of publishers with online communities were convinced that their investment in this market is already paying off and a further 24% believed it would do so in the short term
• 73% of all the publishers interviewed felt that online communities helped or would help them to engage better with their audiences
• 72% of trade publishers said they helped or would help to increase direct relationships with customers and 45% claimed they provided or would provide good marketing support to sales channels
• 40% of academic and professional publishers said that increasing knowledge and understanding of customers was a key benefit, whilst 40% felt increasing content usage was a priority

Although currently only 16% of all respondents viewed online communities as viable direct sales channels, the formats that have benefited most from online community activity are e-books for trade publishers (40%) and online resources for academic publishers (67%).

Commenting on the study Jo Henry, who conducted the research for BMR said: “There is a really significant amount of activity going on in this area as publishers seek new ways in which to engage directly with their consumers.  It is interesting to note that in this survey US publishers were not significantly more advanced than UK ones – but that trade publishers appear to be leading the way in developing online communities.”

Overall, the results of this study tell us that online communities are far more than a channel for selling books or journals. They send a clear message that both trade and academic publishers want to use these platforms to establish closer relationships with their core readers, be it to communicate with them directly or to better understand their needs.

Publishers use of online communities are still in their infancy, as shown by the rapid growth anticipated by most publishers, but the potential they provide for publishers is tantalising. They provide a way of striking up a direct rapport with their customers and, at a time when publishing business models are evolving to become more consumer-focused. They also provide publishers with the new holy grail of the digital consumption and that is customer metrics – real data about their core subscribers or readers.

It comes as no surprise that publishers are ramping up investment in this area.

This is the first major research that has been carried out in this field and the results are significant; they prove that publishers have moved far beyond the testing, experimental phase and now consider online communities to be a powerful tool that is an integral part of their marketing mix.

Publishing acquisitions are one of the defining trends of this year, and this is another example of a large publisher making a canny bet on the future direction of the industry by buying a hotly-tipped start-up. It’s also a deal which I think will suit both parties very well. I always thought that as a standalone company Mendeley would have a fight on its hands to secure sufficient revenues through its model of making revenues pay for services like apps or content storage. What Mendeley has created, however, is a service for storing, sharing and recommending academic content that’s backed up by sophisticated analytics and is already used by more than two million people. If you were a publisher in search of a solution that tells you what content your customers are using, and how they are using it, this would make Mendeley a highly attractive company.

Mendeley should give Elsevier highly detailed insight into user behaviour that should enable its marketing operations to target the right content at exactly the right people. And for publisher like Elsevier, which owns vast quantities of content, the ability to find and share an article within an researcher-focused social network significantly increases the discoverability of that content.

This brings me to the final point as to why this start-up was a smart-buy for Elsevier. Any service that increases the general discoverability of academic content makes it much easier for publishers to demonstrate usage to librarians. This in turn will help to support journal subscriptions, the lifeblood of any academic publisher.

In the immediate aftermath of such an acquisition there are always some that speculation cannot credibly answer. One such question is the concern other publishers may have of non-Elsevier content stored and shared via Mendeley and how Elsevier might see usage habits across non-Elsevier content, but this is something that only time will tell.

What is certain, however, is that in Mendeley Elsevier has acquired an attractive array of services. It may bring very little to Elsevier in terms of revenue, but its value in helping the world’s most successful academic publisher support journal subscriptions could be incalculable.

Publishers have also realised that taking a leaf out of the accelerators’ book can be a relatively affordable and effective way of driving innovation. By setting up their own accelerators, or behaving like venture capitalists and investing in promising-looking companies they can use start-ups as test-beds for innovation ideas, products and practices which they can later acquire.

More recently we’ve seen a flurry of accelerators come to prominence that focus specifically on educational technology, which is an interesting if not unexpected development. As we explored in our Top Five Trends for Publishing in 2013, digital textbooks are very much this year’s hot topic, as the software required to deliver them and hardware on which to use them finally becomes sufficiently sophisticated and affordable. What’s more, in an economic environment where spending power is increasingly migrating south and east to learning rather than leisure oriented economies, education content is becoming more valuable.

In this blog post we’ll be taking a closer look at five Education Technology accelerators that are active in the market at the moment. Some approach the task of nurturing start-ups from a ‘traditional’ accelerator stand-point; others are more driven by the needs of individual companies. What they all have in common, however, is a belief that ed-tech is the centre of the next big technology boom.

1. Macmillan New Ventures

We blogged about Macmillan’s New Ventures initiative ideas in detail last month, but this venture capital-style fund has made a few interesting investments in Brazil. Latin America has so far escaped the worst of the global economic downturn, and education spending across the continent (and in Brazil in particular) has risen as a share of GDP, suggesting that both individuals and their governments are willing to invest in educational content.

2. Pearson Catalyst

With Catalyst, Pearson has gone one step further than Macmillan and created a formal incubator program targeting “dynamic, technology-centric, startup teams” operating in the education sector. The incubator program, which only recently started taking applications for its first round,  will incubate and accelerate up to ten teams of founders for at least three-months starting in mid-April. Start-ups will work and be based out of their existing offices, but with the potential to meet at Pearson, and receive up to $10k in seed capital.

Before Pearson Catalyst announces the shortlisted start-ups it is difficult to tell whether it will have any specific strategic focus, but the fact that it’s taking such a systematic approach to investing in this space suggests its intentions are serious.

3. LearnLaunchX

This Boston-based accelerator was also launched earlier this year and applications to be part of its first ‘class’ will close at the end of March. The education technology start-ups selected will participate in a three-month intensive program which promises a familiar mix of seed-funding ($18,000), mentoring and networking. What makes LearnLaunchX particularly interesting, however, is that its creators have earmarked educational technology innovation as a key means of bringing down the cost of higher education in the US, as well as improving student learning and engagement.

4. Socratic Labs

A New York-based accelerator, Socratic Labs is also about to close applications for its inaugaral class. Offering slightly more in terms of seed capital than LearnLaunchX or Pearson Catalyst ($25,000) Socractic Labs is also notable for its commitment to ‘open source’ its curriculum, sharing the ‘secret sauce’ that enables it to develop successful start-ups with other programs launching elsewhere around the world.

5. Imagine K12

Acknowledged by many in the sector as the elder statesman of ed-tech start-up incubators, Imagine K12 has already completed several accelerator rounds and boasts an impressive track record in which 70% of the companies passing through its doors have successfully secured funding. This success has also trickled through into the ‘real world’ where, according to last year’s estimates 4 million students make use of products and services incubated by the accelerator.

Last year, the ifluential tech-blog TechCrunch wrote this great post breaking down Imagine K12′s activities and rounding up its most prominent graduates, which is worth checking out.

Last year, the award – won by Sydney-based Chris Stephens’s and Jon Attenborough’s of Read How You Want – had a purely digital theme, but since innovation of any kind is key to the strategies of all publishing companies across the industry now, this year’s award will accept nominations of exceptional innovation in any medium, and not just the area of digital.

For anyone that has somehow missed Read How You Want coming onto the scene, the concept and reality of the product is that any publisher using this software can produce content in a variety of digital formats, many of which can then easily be replicated into print. These formats include Braille, DAISY and a variety of large print sizes. Read How You Want has also come up with a solution to produce a phonetic format, which is proven to be far easier to learn and read for people with reading difficulties due to dyslexia. Since winning the award last year, Read How You Want have found there to be considerable crossover for the product into ESL (English as a Second Language) markets and they have been able to use winning the award to springboard into international markets too.

The Awards are open to all Australian-based firms serving the publishing industry and judging criteria for this are as follows:

1) How has the initiative developed new markets for books/content and engaged new consumers both within and outside of the industry in a way that is truly different to traditional book publishing. Please provide examples in terms of consumer attraction, retention, product development and delivery.

2) What makes this innovation unique in the face of world-wide content and technology trends?

To enter please download nomination and payment form below. Once both forms are completed, please email events@publishers.asn.au for submission. An entry fee of $93.50 will apply.

Download Nomination Form

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