Google recently disclosed that they give Web sites higher ranking if they are encrypted. This is but one example of how Google serves as a gatekeeper of the Internet, making cultural decisions in the name of technological elegance.
Although there are clear benefits to being a large publisher to engage in D2C sales, there are practical steps that even the smallest publishers can take. Here is a summary of some options.
There is no comprehensive solutions provider for academic book publishers today. The emergence of such a vendor could transform the academic book publishing world by inviting new entrants into the marketplace.
In order to build direct-to-consumer sales, university presses should consider streamlining their publishing programs and focus on a small number of subject areas, even just a single area.
Sometimes making something available as open access is viewed as an end in itself, but increasingly we are likely to see OA services work to bring the material they publish to wider audiences. This will involve the creation of new marketing services specific to OA. We have yet to determine how such services will be paid for.
Drawing on a presentation from the recent AAUP annual conference, this post argues that the business of publishing scholarly books requires reciprocal arrangements among many publishers. This system is undermined by free riders.
Jill Lepore’s dismissal of Clayton Christensen misses the point. Disruptive technology and Christensen’s method of identifying it are very real elements of the marketplace, though the truth of this is often obscured by some of the silly advocates of disruption.
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s 2011 post on the challenges and the strategies for moving textbooks into the digital era.
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s 2010 post which discussed how improper use of financial analysis can obscure problems in strategy, a problem faced by for-profit and not-for-profit organizations alike.
The altmetrics movement is a key aspect of scholarly communications today. We can learn more about altmetrics by studying the statistical analysis of baseball.
The best way to increase D2C sales is to work in increasing the traffic to your site. Without traffic, there can be few sales. Unfortunately, the university press community has paid little attention to building Web traffic.
Discourse about new ideas in publishing can be broken by the appetite to make exquisitely insightful remarks about things to do not yet exist. To work on truly new things, we have to stop performing the role of the skeptic.
The world of journals publishing is constantly changing, and one relatively new entrant is the library as publisher. There is a need to study and publish these programs in order to optimize their performance.
The problem of piracy is not easily solved with legal or even technical initiatives. To make piracy less significant, publishers need to create a different kind of content service, one that is resistant to piracy because of its dynamic nature.
University presses cite a number of reasons to sell books directly to end-users. The principal reason is to establish a relationship with the customer. But once that relationship has been initiated, what business purpose does it serve?