Preparing for the Industry’s Future

Given a stable print model and rapidly changing digital market, Woll had several key recommendations for publishers.

Plan for continued consolidation among independent booksellers and a “revision of the superstore concept,” he said, citing the emergence of Borders Express as a harbinger of retailers’ scaling back in response to online purchasing.

Planning for increased digital distribution involves understanding emerging business models. If you are going to give something away for free online, make sure it brings people into a “buying scenario,” Woll said. “You have to think of profi t, not just hits and clicks. … The electronic world demands a business structure.”

Woll said subscription pricing or tiered pricing models, such as that adopted by the National Academies Press, can work well, depending on the audience. However you sell, he stressed, make the ordering process easy for consumers.

Repurposing is a strategy both for content and distribution, he added, in that different confi gurations of content demand different methods. Publishers must understand the uses of metadata and have an effective content management system.

In explaining the vision behind Ingram Digital’s success, Weinstein spoke of book distribution as a continuum from print to digital. The challenge is in managing, promoting and distributing content in and between these various forms.

As the Web becomes more vertical, “special niches are becoming siloed,” Weinstein said. The challenge, in many cases, is simply fi nding the consumer.

“There are three rules to live by for a book publisher, in our opinion,” he said. “Publishers should never miss a sale for any title. Customers should always be able to fi nd what they want and find it easily. No. 3 is, refer to Nos. 1 and 2.”

Manage digital assets to fully exploit new possibilities, including selling outof-print titles, repurposing content and driving new marketing strategies such as book previews, Weinstein said. Ingram’s service “turns virtually anybody into a bookseller” with widgets and other interactive applications, he added.