Reading analytics provides essential feedback loop to educators and authors.

Last year was a milestone for book publishers: ebooks outsold physical copies for the first time. While that may hardly be news to people clutching iPads, Kindles, Nooks, Kobos and whatever device-du jour is released for the holidays, it could have been a scary proposition for the thousands of independent and medium-sized book publishers — who just didn’t have the deep pockets to create a digital-first infrastructure.

MBS had been a long-time client of MarkLogic’s. As an educational book distributor the Missouri-based company had been looking for new ways to approach the educational market. They tried a social medium platform that would allow students and faculty to share academic notes, materials, videos, second hand books, etc. The platform could be private-labeled for universities. The business model was illusive though, and it didn’t solve a growing problem that MBS was facing: smaller book publishers did not have their books in digital format which was impacting MBS’ core business.

Digital conversion allows integrity of page numbering — despite how content reflows into devices.

Instead MBS looked at the success and the flexibility of the platform and decided that while it had merit — what was really needed was to take a step back and help educational publishers get their material into true a digital format. “Smaller publishers didn’t have the technology know-how — or the infrastructure to create true digital products,” said Rob Reynolds, Director of Technology for MBS’ new division Direct Digital. “For the most part, smaller publishers were trying to solve the problem using PDFs — which is cumbersome for the reader — and very risky — as there is no way to protect the intellectual property.”

The company went back to the drawing board and asked for market requirements from long-time clients like Jones Bartlett and Ave Maria Press. MBS knew that MarkLogic would provide an agile development platform and that it would be the best technology to handle XML “the lingua franca of publishers,” said Reynolds. What resulted is now an entire book publishing ecosystem that includes conversion to digital, semantic enrichment, channel-selling infrastructure (including private label), and even, reading analytics. “The entire system is something that the biggest publishers have been able to create,” said Reynolds. Almost. The reading analytics is truly ground breaking. As students read chapters — and click on elements within the digital product — that is captured and reported back. So for the first time the efficacy of the materials is available to educators and authors — creating a valuable feedback loop that reveals what is working — and what is not.

For Ave Maria Press, a tiny publisher with a 150-year old history providing 15 religious titles to K-12, it has retired the risky PDF solution and is now delivering ebooks. Jared Dees, Ave’s digital strategist joined Rob, me and my colleague Matt Turner on a webcast last week and described the entire engagement with Direct Digital as very quick. “We started in late spring of 2012 and we were up with a private label bookstore by the start of the school year.” Although because of the buying cycles of books he can not yet predict the actual percentage increase of sales, Dees does know that the new system is having a big impact. ”In just one year Direct Digital has opened up new revenue streams and we are seeing a tremendous increase in downloads.”

According to Reynolds the on boarding time for a new publisher is about 10-12 weeks — and the cost is pennies on the dollar of what it costs to print  and store physical copies. Listen to the whole interview or just sign up for the demo.

Keeping Independent Book Publishers … Independent from MarkLogic.