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Bloomsbury Publishing has selected PCG to be its exclusive sales, marketing and customer service partner for its two newest projects: The Churchill Archive and Drama Online.
PCG will leverage its expertise in the international library market to promote and sell these prestigious collections, published entirely in digital format for the first time.
More information on this announcement to follow.
Publishing Technology China launches at the Beijing International Book Fair
Company to offer full-service digital publishing solutions for Chinese content.
London and Beijing, 31st August 2011 – Publishing Technology plc (LSE: PTO), the largest provider of software and services to the publishing industry, has announced its expansion into the prospering Chinese market by delivering local online hosting platforms and domestic sales representation.
Based in Beijing and managed by digital publishing expert Helen Sun, Publishing Technology China will directly target Chinese publishers, offering a complete publishing solution through ingentaconnect, the largest single platform for research publishers. Ms. Sun will combine her vast industry experience and knowledge of the Chinese market with an existing network of experienced sales representatives located around the country. The innovative technology together with native expertise will increase visibility of Chinese content, create new revenue streams, and facilitate sales to researchers and librarians globally.
The joint venture is the latest extension of Publishing Technology’s operations as demand for digital publishing solutions increases across the globe. Home to over 15,500 electronic publications and over 250 partners, the ingentaconnect interface will be offered in both Mandarin and Cantonese along with a subset of high-profile content to several thousand libraries across the country, creating a new user base for international publishers in addition to encouraging Chinese publishers to move online.
As part of the launch, the company’s Publishers Communication Group (PCG) division will also leverage the established national sales network to roll out its sales and marketing services. Initially, PCG will represent the American Association for Cancer Research in mainland China, as well as BioOne in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
George Lossius, CEO of Publishing Technology, commented: “The Chinese publishing industry is fast-paced and flourishing, currently growing at an astonishing rate of 19% a year. With over 8,000 academic journals and a booming scientific research community, second only to that of the US, China represents a major opportunity for us – and it is also relatively untapped in terms of digital resources for publishers and end users. Helen is a tremendously talented digital publishing expert with a proven track record in the Chinese market. This, coupled with Publishing Technology’s innovation and market-leading product, will make it a winning partnership.”
Helen Sun, CEO of Publishing Technology China said: “It is a great honour to work with such a trusted and established company as Publishing Technology, and even more exciting to become a part of it. The joint venture with Publishing Technology will provide not only world-leading technologies with proven marketing and customer service support to Chinese publishers, but it will also offer a great distribution platform in China to all publishers across the Atlantic. Our partnership combines leading digital technologies with digital content providers that already have a wide network within the publishing industry and library community in China and we look forward to welcoming more publishers to our rapidly increasing client base.”
Posted on July 7, 2011 by Janet Fisher in the Publishing Technology Blog
Publishers always depend on data: may it be the number of copies purchased by a bookstore or wholesellers for book publishers, or the profile of their subscribers to a particular title or collection for journal publishers. But today, we have to know more. In the world of electronic publishing we have to know how much usage our products are getting and how they are being used. This issue was examined in a valuable session at the June 2011 meeting of the Society of Scholarly Publishing (www.sspnet.org).
Library customers have for years now stressed the importance of receiving COUNTER-compliant usage statistics for the electronic materials to which they subscribe. But publishers today must also mine the information they can collect from their electronic platforms in order to market their products most effectively to new potential customers and to retain their current subscribers.
In our renewal campaigns, Publishers Communication Group (PCG) finds that one of the major reasons for cancelling a subscription is lack of usage (http://www.pcgplus.com/pdfs/trends_05_10.pdf). To proactively avoid these situations, publishers can now examine their usage reports to gain a better understanding of some of the questions below. For example:
Google Analytics can also be employed to add further context to standard usage information. The day is coming when the standard renewal notice will include not just price and type of subscription, but information harvested from a variety of data gathering tools about how valuable the content has proven to be at the institution.
In addition to being a valuable tool for renewals, usage statistics can help publishers to identify strong prospects for new subscriptions. Monitoring turnaways and where they are coming from should lead publishers to institutions that are likely to have a high interest in their content.
Publishing Technology’s marketing division Publishers Communication Group helps publishers sort through all this data to develop plans for leveraging the tools at their disposals. As a result, well-designed campaigns can help boost usage where it is too low and find valuable new prospects. Contact us at inquire@pcgplus.com for more information.
This cool little tool from Springer shows real-time visualizations of where people are downloading content from their online platforms. Go to realtime.springer.com to see a few others, including the below tool, which shows different types of content as they are downloaded.
Last week, the social cataloging service LibraryThing announced the launch of a new feature called “LibraryThing for Publishers.”
For the uninitiated, LibraryThing is a “social cataloging web application for storing and sharing personal library catalogs and book lists” that as of last fall boasted “920,000 users and nearly 45 million books.” (wiki) The new feature is a way to better connect publishers with the readers and catalogers of their books. According to the announcement, publishers get:
And members get:
Just today, LibraryThing announced the participation of 21 new publishers in the service, including Penguin Australia, Candlewick Press, and The Rand Corporation.
PCG’s European Business Development Manager, Marco Castellan, will be at the IFLA World Library and Information Congress 2010, from August 10 – 15 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Please let us know if you plan to attend, or if you would be interested in participating in any of PCG’s librarian and/or consortia rep meetings.
Our friend Mark Lord over at Professional Engineering Publishing has a very interesting post up about what Google’s new “Caffeine” search index might mean to publishers. Caffeine is designed to provide “fresher” results, and may affect how easy/difficult it is for users to discover your content. From the piece:
If you do a search [with Google Caffeine] you will see a lot more hits that are from news sites, video sites, images, respected sources and social media – so results from Twitter for instance. In the past the ranking of results would depend more simply on relevance and PageRank. But now Google want to make their content as current as possible, so if you have content that is on a slower refresh cycle you could suffer.
So why is Caffeine of importance to publishers of scholarly journals? Well it could fundamentally change the search results that users of Google see. It’s very likely that unless publishers keep pace with Google’s changes they may find their websites attracting less traffic from Google.
Mark fleshes out the potential threats and opportunities on the PEP blog: http://acadblog.pepublishing.com/.
At the AAUP Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City this month, Joseph Esposito (CEO of GiantChair) shared his intriguing vision of the future of university presses and book publishing in general. Mr. Esposito describes 5 different coexisting “stages” of book publishing, from Stage One (“The medium was print; the distribution indirect…and the entire business was conducted in the world of bricks and mortar”) to Stage Two (“the paradigm for online bookselling of print books”) to the more recent, ebook-centered stages. The proposed model for the future, Stage Five, envisions a world in which university presses publish high-quality ebooks in a few target areas, then stream access to these titles via subscription-based aggregators.
Citing the subscription-based models of Netflix’s streaming videos and Pandora’s streaming music, Mr. Esposito points out
I cannot help but remark on the irony that so many pundits say that the book business is going to move in the direction of the music business, with massive piracy and the equivalent of Apple’s iTunes. Meanwhile, the music business is beginning to look more and more like the traditional magazine or journals business, except that the products are delivered online.
and offers a somewhat striking prediction, given the audience of university press book publishers:
I am predicting that everyone in this room will become a Web marketer, a direct marketer, and a manager of a subscription service in the coming years. If you are thinking about sustainability, the time to begin working on these things is now. Look forward, not back; think innovation, not preservation.
I am looking forward to someday becoming a subscriber to a university press. It is inevitable.
The whole talk is posted on the AAUP website and is worth a read if you have a few minutes.
Janet Fisher
At an ALPSP North America seminar last October, Digital Publishing Analyst Ted Freeman (Atypon Systems) made a presentation entitled “Marketing Online in Scholarly Publishing.” The emphasis was on how publishers can use their content websites to market their publications. Here are some of his ideas:
Another example:
A similar concept can be applied for marketing directly to libraries. In this case, show the librarians the usage that their patrons are making of the content. For example:
In summary, use the technology of your content platform to leverage users and market content. Ted can be contacted at tedfre@gmail.com.
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