Increasing Sales, One Chapter at a Time

While publishers of technology books, such as O’Reilly and Wiley, naturally tend to be ahead of the curve when it comes to digital pursuits––“It’s the nature of the content we write about,” says Noren––other professional publishers are taking more of a slow-and-steady approach. “We’re certainly not at the point to be [selling books by chapter],” says Simonds. “We’re interested and just keeping our eye on it. When we start to get pressure from our customers for that, that’s probably when we’ll start to speed it up.”

“We tend to spend more time evaluating if we want to do something,” Simonds continues. “So we may not be the first kid on the block to do it; we may be the eighth kid. But we’ll be very thoughtful about whether we’ll go down a certain path because we don’t want to take the time and expense for something that customers may not want.” BB