Customizing course books and course packs is getting easier, cheaper, and more secure, to the delight of course creators and publishers both. Now you can pick several chapters, or individual sections from various chapters, assemble them quickly into various formats, including print, and voila!—course-specific custom textbooks made easy and painless. And thanks to Dubuque, Iowa–based Qbend’s new drag-and-drop interface, appropriately named SNAP (Search, Navigate, Assemble, Publish), creators can chose from a list of text and cover designs to lend the customized book a consistent feel. With secure access, built-in templates, and dashboard to monitor the customization, SNAP enables publishers to move to a digital-first workflow as well as to repurpose existing content for multichannel delivery.
Patent-pending SNAP also offers multichannel publishing capabilities so that publishers can easily pivot their content to various devices and distribution channels at minimal cost. “With the digital book market undergoing tremendous changes each day, our research team is working overtime to ensure that the publishers’ content is future-ready and obsolescence-proof,” says Qbend COO Kaushik Sampath. “Continuous research and development would ensure that when new formats are gaining ground, publishers have the tools needed—from Qbend and our parent company, S4Carlisle—to be ahead of the race.”
In addition to custom publishing, Qbend provides a WebStore service, which allows content to be sold in chapters or other logical parts to a much wider audience.
The WebStore service, launched in August 2011, offers publishers an effective way of establishing and maximizing e-book sales. “Our service includes e-book creation, sales, fulfillment, customer intelligence, and custom and multichannel publishing,” says Kris Srinaath, CEO of Qbend, whose team has leveraged 35 years of publishing experience and digital technology to create the e-book platform. “With our customized WebStore service, publishers can have their own e-bookstore with their own content and company identity—but with Qbend doing all the work behind the scenes and hosting the site.”
Presently, the WebStore has more than 400,000 titles, with formats such as ePUB, PDFs and Flash. “The lowest-priced content costs $1.82 while the highest is at $4,000. But most of the content—over 95%—falls in the range of $4 to $200,” explains Srinaath, pointing out that clients can easily generate customized business analytics of their e-book sales.
Qbend’s adoption of Adobe Content Server (currently the most popular digital rights management system) also means that there is no unauthorized sharing, printing or copying of content, and publishers can be assured that the content is used only in ways that they have specified. In other words, publishers maximize their digital presence without having to spend enormous amount of money on infrastructure and IT resources.
“With the global e-book market estimated to grow at 42% each year, now is the best time to be in the e-book business. We are here to help publishers and content creators obtain global reach with minimal investment at high profits,” adds Srinaath, who will be at the Qbend booth (DZ2306) to further explain both SNAP and WebStore services to interested parties.
