BRING YOUR BOOKS TO LIFE ON THE WEB

“The Web sites allow us to add a much greater range of content,” agrees Matt Kay, marketing executive and systems coordinator at Macmillan Education, publisher of the “Inside Out” grammar courses. “We can also add supplementary material that you would not put into a teacher’s book.”

Popular on the “Inside Out” Web site (InsideOut.net) are weekly e-lesson plans for teachers. Multimedia features include streaming video suitable for lesson delivery or submission of student-generated content.

“People are becoming more and more comfortable on the Web, and have come to expect a certain level of sophistication from the sites and software they use.
For our courses to be seen as modern and innovative, we need to embrace these types of technologies and deliver materials in these different formats,” Kay notes.

Marshall and Kay agree that the ability to frequently update information is a big plus.

“The old problem of having new books and a new-edition cycle, where your book was inevitably out of date for the last couple of years [until the new edition was published] … we can put a lot of that to rest with online updates,” Marshall says.

For the same reason, publishers of encyclopedias were early to embrace the idea of companion Web sites. For World Book Inc. (WorldBookOnline.com), the move was necessary to stay in line with the expectations of today’s students.

One of the company’s newest endeavors, World Book Advanced, launched in June, integrates current events, primary source materials and multimedia features into a continuously updated bank of reference articles aimed at high school and college students. Users can create customized accounts that allow them to save their work online.

“We have a distinct advantage in that our brand is so well known, but most people, when they think of our brand, think of just the encyclopedia. So what our online products allow us to do is introduce people to some of our other publications, both print and online, in a new format,” says Jennifer Parello, World Book’s associate director of marketing.