Experimenting Pays Off, BISG Panelists Say
by Jim Milliot -- Publishers Weekly, 5/9/2008 12:27:00 PM
Several panelists at the Book Industry Study Group’s Making Information Pay seminar held Friday morning in New York came prepared with statistics to document how experimentation in the digital age has indeed paid off.
Todd Anderson, director of the University of Alberta Bookstore, gave his unqualified support to the Espresso Book Machine, which the bookstore installed last November 1. The $144,000 machine allows the bookstore to print individual books from a variety of different files. “Our model is sell one, print one,” Anderson said. Through the early part of February, UAB had printed 2,364 books, totaling 537,754 pages, Anderson said. Since that time, the bookstore has printed another 1,500 books with the Espresso. While Anderson had expected to focus on printing customized coursepacks and anthologies as well as public domain titles, he said UAB has done a wider range of books, including printing six titles for publishers of books that had gone out-of-stock. “I love doing that,” Anderson said. “We don’t want to be a publisher or a printer,” Anderson added, noting the objective of using the Espresso Machine is to serve the UAB community.
HarperCollins senior v-p for global marketing strategy and operations Carolyn Pittis provided a few numbers on the results of an upgrade to the Browse Inside feature on the Web site. Consumers are spending an average of about 10 minutes on the Harper site, and while those that use the Search function are more likely to buy a book (though not necessarily from the Harper site), only about 20% of browsers know the search function exists. Pittis said Harper’s newer initiatives are geared toward putting the company more in touch with its readers, and she cited in particular the just launched authonomy.com site, which brings together writers, readers and editors online.
Michael Shatzkin, founder of the Idea Logical Company, and Michael Healy, executive director of BISG, presented the results of a survey Idea did with BISG on the state of experimentation and innovation in the industry. Approximately two-thirds of trade publishing respondents said they believe experimentation is crucial to the future success of the industry, while more than 75% of educational and professional publishers believed innovation is critical to the future. Just over 81% of trade publishers said experiments have led to changes in their normal work practices, while 87% of nontrade publishers reported changes.
The most common experiments involve the Web, either through new marketing techniques or redesigns of corporate sites. Nearly 69% of trade publishers said experiments had resulted in new products, while 77% of nontrade publishers said they had created new products. The source of innovation comes from a number of places, ranging from top management to “literally anybody” at the company, the survey found.
Shatzkin advised publishers to have a formulized process for encouraging experimentation and companies should put one person in charge of the process. That person, Shatzkin said, shouldn’t come from the IT department, but rather should be someone from the publishing side with a background in business who understands the needs of the marketplace.
