Ebooks: Taking a leap of Faith

As many as you may know we already feature e-books but previously it has been through ebook aggregators. We felt this was a necessary first step to make sure we didn't rush in and make common mistakes.

After this booming year in the publishing industry, we felt that it was time to venture into the waters of retail e-books. At the moment we distribute through Gardners, IPG, 123Doc and Dawsonera.com. These are all ebook/library distributors. We also now sell our ebooks from retail websites. These are Airiti and PaperC. However both retailers operate outside of the UK, which is why we are looking to expand to the UK market.

To solve this we looked at a number of company's that offered Digital Publishing Solutions at the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair. We decided on and started negotiations with MPS (MacMillan Publishing Solutions).

 'MPS is the global leader of high-quality publishing solutions that cover every stage of the author-to-reader publishing process.'

 MPS will enable NUP to sell its own ebooks. A huge benefit to working with MPS is that is will allow us to directly sell our ebooks to our customers instead of having to work with a number of 3rd parties. This move should ultimately gives us more power but will also allow us to work with more seasoned experts, especially ones who can help us with approaching this new market.

We look forward to seeing the results of this project.  Please check out our website for new information - we look forward to seeing you there.

A Step into the unknown......

In the recent months since the Frankfurt Book Fair. Nup has been making several efforts to expand its business offerings. One huge improvement is the search and discovery programmes NUP has taken on board. These programmes are designed to increase book discovery and create book citation indexes for our titles. Thus forth enhancing and improving the discovery of our titles.

The two companies that we are currently working with is Thomson Reuters 'Web of Science' and Bowker's:

The company Thomson Reuters is already fairly well known for its Web of Science Programme, this has already been highly successful using Journals. We will be working with them on creating citation indexes for all of our titles. To explain more clearly, a citation index is a collection of all the cited references found in the footnotes and bibliographies of our titles. Researchers, readers and students can then use the citation index to quickly and efficiently identify the most relevant information for their work i.e. they would be able to look at the index for one of our titles and quickly identify whether the information within the chosen text was appropriate for their research. Benefits for us from this includes increased visibility of our titles, accelerated discovery of those titles and increase usage. It will also increase the visibility of our business (NUP) and can attract authors and researchers from around the world.

Bowker's offers a slightly different service being a search and discovery product. The company is developing data mining and profiling applications designed to enhance book discovery. This specifically will be able to produce academic book profiles. These profiles will include word and word-group relevancies such as keywords, as well as information about genre and time periods. This enriched meta-data about our titles enables Bowker's products (these being Books in Print and Syndetic Solutions - Bowler's online library catalog enrichment service) to provide better book discoverability to libraries and therefore our end users.

By using these new services NUP can maximise visibility of its titles especially within the academic market, which is a key market of many of NUP's more technical titles. It also makes it easier for them to find, which in turn makes them more likely to be used. This can lead to sales of titles, as well as increasing the visibility of the Press as a company and of the brand that is NUP.