AAUP 2011: New E-book Aggregations

Editor's Notes

1. Flickr, Creative Commons: Choo Yut Shing http://www.flickr.com/photos/25802865@N08/3686204262/
2. *Switch over from Ebooks to Ereference – even though the medium is the same it is slightly difference (end user behavior; budgets, etc) *revenue is a blend of new sales and renewals *will end up FY about $100,000 down from last year. Very pleased with this – no new products this year. Made up entire amount on new business (New York Public Library, Penn State, Notre Dame, U of Illinois) and retaining existing customers *about 1M last FY *Still processing renewals and new orders this week – LSU (CHO) and Toronto (SSO)
3. Thank you Meslissane for slotting the time for this presentation into the sales conference. What I would like to do if provide a brief overview of Cambridge Books Online, our other digital reference projects and our ebook sales through our partners. To clarify my remarks will focus on institutional digital sales rather than individual. What do I mean by institutional: Our core market for ebooks and digital reference are Academic Libraries (as well as some publics, corporate and government). They are purchasing digital content on behalf of their patrons and users. These can be multi-person licenses or single use. The flip side to insitutional sales (and still a very nice chunk of revenue for us) are Individual sales via traditional retail partners. This would cover sales for Kindle, Nook, Ipad, KOBO.
4. Thousands of front & backlist titles (11,135in April 11). Upload titles to the platform once a month with functionality updates twice a year. Since we’ve launched we’ve had 3 with the most recent this week! One thing that has become very clear to me when dealing with libraries and ebooks is that one size does not fit all as far as ebook collection development. Each institution has different rates of conversion and this can vary across library selectors and budget segments. Having flexibility with content selection has been key. Comprehensive library support tools including downloadable MARC records, usage reports and access & authentication methods
5. Start with the centerpiece of the current program – Cambridge Books Online CBO launched in January 2010 Build by our colleagues in Manila using much of the technology developed by Cambridge Journals Online. So far positive feedback, and product will continue to evolve to respond to the changing needs of the market *The platform was awarded a Choice Outstanding Academic Title designation this past January and has gotten positive reviews from library media. Large number of titles, on par with competitors (Wiley, T&F, Elsevier) but CBO has larger number of far backlist
6. I know this was a lot of information (and acronyms) in a short amount of time but I’d like to thank you all for your attention and please let me know if you have any questions or would like any marketing materials for our products discusses today.
7. I realize it’s probably not going to make launch, but we should talk up the mobile end of the site. XML really helps here because instead of downloading a PDF, we’re offering HTML (generated from XML) which will generally be smaller and faster to download. XML also allows us to reflow text which makes for a far superior mobile reading experience. if you need a talking point about why XML is better than PDF beyond mobile, here are a few of the advanced search fields that would not be available on a PDF platform:   Headings Index Bibliography Captions Tables   It’s also unlikely that PDF will support links between references and notes.