E-books Suzanne BeDell, managing director, Science and Technology Books, Elsevier W


hen we talk about e-books we mean books to be read on devices and e-readers, which all our books are, in all e-book formats. One third of our e-book sales last year came through Amazon but access on the iPad is increasing. Our e-books are also available through the B&N platform on the Nook device and through Google Books too. It requires considerable work and investment to manage and support the different feeds and the metadata to go with them. We have also, for the first time, taken a brain


atlas and made it available in a really interactive way as an app. Our first app – the Oishi MRI


‘I foresee what we are doing in apps and e-books coming together’


Atlas (see page 31) – enables scientists to see how the brain works. It allows researchers to compare different sections of the brain in one view on their iPads. As they move through the 3D image it works almost like an MRI scan


and information is available in an immediate and interactive way. We are thinking of this new digital Oishi MRI Atlas as a prototype for our other atlases. It allows much more efficient interaction than with a print atlas. We still have print atlases but we’d like to make them available in more creative ways. We are looking at, for example, putting them on ScienceDirect.


Price points are a big issue for these apps. The first costs $99.99, a high price point because it delivers a lots of benefits – convenience of searching and immediacy of results, higher resolution for clear understanding, ability to save pictures for presentations or email. Our next app – about named reactions – will be much less expensive and then we are going to do an app with both free and paid-for functionality and content.


I foresee what we are doing in the apps and what we are doing in e-books coming together. We are experimenting with EPUB 3 to see what


sort of functionality we can get. The challenge for publishers is how to add all these rich interactive feature sets to the text and deliver it at a price that the customer can afford. Maybe e-readers will just become tablets with the ability to give very rich media experience from within the content of the book. People want to interact more with the data. This is much easier than with a printed book. I’d like to get to the point with print where we print a book when somebody orders it. This is much more environmentally friendly. When we look at the number of books we print and put in warehouses it’s really phenomenal. We have, or are negotiating, print on demand (POD) agreements globally and when we reprint books now it is often as POD. It will be an integrated part of the process as systems become more electronic. Currently, we have books printed in China and then shipped half the world away. Instead we could do POD where the books will be distributed.


FEATURE


John Wheeler, VP strategy and emerging technologies, SPi Content Solutions – SPi Global I


’d call e-books stable and mildly mature. In some cases it is very easy to make an e-book; in some it is very hard. Creating a physical representation that mirrors


print


in terms of location of images, for example, is more difficult to do. There is a great range in delivery devices. The initial content manufacturing is all the same but the markup is different for the iPad, Kindle, Nook etc so we need to ask which users are going to use which readers. The most popular format that we see today is the Kindle; the second is the version of the Kindle that works on the iPad.


Most organisations are trying to establish electronic workflows. Many companies are producing e-book hybrids – PDF with some XML markup – and many of the huge backfile conversions we’ve done for publishers take this approach. Conversion methodology is very mature and plays across a number of devices. Not a lot of decision making is required by publishers and it is not difficult for libraries to understand.


www.researchinformation.info


However, we have had customers who’ve asked us to do PDF and then a year later come back for XML. This may be because the market or technology has shifted or that they have developed a taxonomy to add value to XML.


On the e-book front everyone has great hopes but is holding their


breath about EPUB 3. It has the potential to deconfuse but that depends on how well device manufacturers play along. Device manufacturers say that some level of deviation


‘Everyone has great hopes but is holding their breath about EPUB 3’


from the standard makes them unique and adds value but it makes it very difficult to put a standard EPUB product on those devices. Many books are still being written with static content in mind and much of the industry is still only thinking in terms of chapters. At the other end of the spectrum we have


organisations who are completely thinking of enhancements from the beginning. With HTML5 and EPUB 3 we’ll see lots of enhanced products with interactivity and video. It is a new way of working. Medicine and science are obvious areas to do this. A challenge we face is keeping everybody’s expectations in line. A lot of people think it’s easy to achieve amazing things with whatever they throw at us so we need to manage expectations about what can actually be achieved.


In five years’ time my dream scenario would be dealing with publishers who’ve come to some understanding about how customers want to consume content and have workflows that enable the creation of different types of content.


My prediction is that publishers will continue to develop in understanding customers, they will have made some progress in workflows but there will be some legacy systems too. There will also be some standardisation. There will be more and more products in electronic format that leverage their platforms better with greater discoverability.


APR/MAY 2012 Research Information 17


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