Lightning Source Global Newsletter

By Linda Bennett, Guest Columnist

The last twelve months have seen some profound changes in the publishing and book industry in the UK and Europe, with the UK usually operating a little ahead of its European counterparts. Some of these changes have been influenced by developments that have already taken place in the US; some have evolved independently to suit the particular market needs of the region. This article sets out to identify some of the most important changes, and indicates in brief how solutions developed by the Ingram companies are helping the industry to cope in this time of transition.

While it is impossible to predict which initiatives will have the greatest long-term influence on the future of the industry, one which will surely be of lasting significance is that trade publishing has finally ‘gone digital’, long after STM publishing, it is true, but with great enthusiasm and financial commitment. This means that trade publishers are now engaging fully with multi-channel, multi-format retailing. Important examples include:

• At Random House: print, e-books, audiobooks and ‘Classics On Demand’ are all now advertised on the company website. Random House e-books are available via Waterstone’s .
• At Pan Macmillan, e-books are downloadable to handheld readers (in four formats) or i-Phone (Lexcycle Stanza) from the website.
• At HarperCollins, e-books are downloadable from the website. Audiobooks are advertised as available from Amazon.
• At John Wiley & Sons, Hachette Book Group, McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and W.W. Norton, select titles have been made available for purchase on Espresso Book Machines

Greater interest in digitization and e-commerce has meant that trade publishers are becoming much more receptive to developing a Print on Demand strategy (historically, POD has mainly been the preserve of academic publishers). Lightning Source continues to be the POD industry leader in the UK and Europe. Its unique role as a channel distributor is also key, as both publishers and booksellers develop their e-commerce activities. In the recent past when publishers increased their digital profile it often meant that the relationship between them and booksellers became uneasy, because booksellers felt that they were being squeezed out of the supply chain. However, there are now major initiatives in place to enable booksellers to provide a full e-commerce service at an affordable price.

As they have focused their attention on digital opportunities, trade publishers have taken their cue from other industries and tried to make their online offer part of a complete ‘lifestyle’ experience. Their websites now contain a wide range of features designed to promote consumer ‘stickiness’ and loyalty. These include blogs, opportunities to tap in to social networks, ‘virtual’ book clubs and reading groups, online newsletters, the ability to sign up for author event e-mail alerts, podcasts, loyalty rewards, and affiliate link-throughs: for example, Ebury has a link to Time Out and the Time Out online bookshop. Penguin even has an online dating section on its website. The aim is to make books an integral and indispensable part of everyone’s life or - as marketing consultant Damian Horner put it at the UK Booksellers Association Conference which took place during the first week of June – to create ‘bookaholism’ everywhere. Social networks have proved a particularly powerful aid to the industry in making books ubiquitous – particularly since the invention of the ‘Search Inside the Book’ widget. Enthusiastic readers can upload widgets of their favourite books and upload them into chat-rooms, blogs and social network sites, giving the publisher effective free marketing. Ingram’s ‘Browse and Buy’ widget is one of the most sophisticated on the market.

Academic publishers have been exploring digital opportunities since the 1990s. However, in response to the changing requirements of academics and the associated need of librarians to be able to access materials suitable for electronic coursepacks and VLEs, as well as the imperative to provide the best possible value for money, publishers have had to make their offer more flexible by delivering content with greater precision and ‘granularity’ so that it can be ‘repurposed’. Academic publishers want their platform or website to be a one-stop-shop which can deliver some or all of the following: printed text; printed text + online resources; print and electronic journals; e-books; slice-and-dice, chunking and downloadable single chapter facilities; do-it-yourself textbooks (print and electronic); and ‘versioning’ of textbooks to accommodate the needs of different regions worldwide. Coutts and the Ingram Digital suite of solutions, comprising CoreSource (IDG’s Digital Asset Management and Delivery system), Vital Source (IDG’s academic publications repurposing system), MyiLibrary (IDG’s now extremely well-known e-book aggregator platform) and bespoke versions of them cater for all of these requirements. Vital Source technology also powers CourseSmart, a collaborative venture between several prominent academic publishers in the US to make their shared content available for universities to customise. CourseSmart is another initiative that is being closely watched in the UK, with several publishers hoping that it may also be introduced here.

Institutional supply of course has close affinities with the academic publishing industry, and its end-users’ needs are changing rapidly. As well as being able to access content in a variety of formats, as already discussed, academic librarians are also interested in having more textbooks made available in e-format; creating a mechanism for obtaining out-of-print titles without having to search secondhand bookseller sites; and being able to make publications available in formats that meet the complaints of the UK’s SENDA (Special Educational Needs and Disability Act, 2001) and its EU equivalents. Several Ingram companies working in tandem – Coutts, MyiLibrary and Lightning Source – are able to deliver all of these things.

That the Ingram companies together can provide a comprehensive solution for book sales is particularly timely, because of moves within the industry to consolidate purchasing even further. What next for Ingram? Both by acquisition and internal growth and development, Ingram has put the building blocks in place in order to be able to serve the needs of all sectors of the book industry in the twenty-first century. As a group, the Ingram companies flourish by adopting what may be described as cautious proactivity. They do not scramble on every bandwagon, but are sensitive to the demands of the market and listen carefully, particularly to their clients. It will be their clients who help to shape what they do next.