Digital Publishing: Serving the Changing Needs of Our Customers

By Bill Evans
CEO, Evan-Moor Educational Publishers

Evan-Moor Educational Publishers began selling e-books on our website approximately five years ago. We knew that teachers entering the education field fresh out of college were used to working in a digital world. We also knew that customers generally like to get their product as quickly as possible, and with the digital book delivery is instantaneous.

In 2003 Evan-Moor had e-book sales on its website of over $30,000. During the next 4 years, we had an average increase of about 70 percent a year, which meant revenue of about $212,000 for 2007. This was achieved without any special promotion. We simply added the e-book product to the paper-and-ink product on our Web site. While this is a very small part of our overall revenue, it is revenue that falls directly to the bottom-line.

I think we can all agree that there is a definite trend here. The size of this opportunity is substantial.

I don’t think for a moment that the paper book is going away, but neither is the e-book. It’s just a question of how rapid the adoption of this new medium will be. I attended a National School Supply and Equipment Association (NSSEA) meeting where Scholastic held a seminar encouraging educational dealers to add e-books to their Web sites. At the Evan-Moor booth, we had a record number of dealers inquiring about adding our e-books to their Web sites, as well.

Given this trend, I thought I would share with you nine of the most frequently asked questions and my answers to them.

1. How secure is the e-book format? How can I be sure that my intellectual property isn’t going to be e-mailed to 150 of my customer’s closest friends?

Before answering this question, we first have to ask: How safe is a paper and ink book? The truth is that with better and better scanning techniques and better and better character recognition, any paper and ink book can be made into a digital book in a matter of minutes. Whether it’s a paper and ink book or a digital book, publishers will have to be vigilant about protecting their copyrights.

Evan-Moor has already had to write several cease and desist letters to people who were selling our digital books on e-Bay illegally. Unlike a paper and ink book, Evan-Moor is able to encrypt customer information into every digital book that is sold. If we find copies of that digital book being distributed illegally, we are able to identify the original purchaser and take appropriate legal action. In the near future, digital books will be able to “phone home” when they are opened on a person’s computer. In this way, we’ll be able to track usage of the book by IP address. If we note that the book is being used in many different locations, we’ll be able to investigate the matter before it becomes a real problem.

2. Will digital books cut into my other sales?

That has certainly not been our experience at Evan-Moor. It has been our experience that it actually grows the sales of a book. We believe this is because we are serving a different customer–a customer who has not previously been served. However, if the format did replace the sales of a paper and ink book, it would still mean greater profits for your company. Without any costs of goods sold or the costs of incoming and outgoing shipping, more money drops to the bottom line.

3. How should I price an e-book?

I’ve always taken the position that I’m not selling paper and ink. Rather, I’m selling content. The publisher may be saving on the cost of goods sold, but the customer is also saving the cost of shipping. In addition, the customer gets immediate delivery of the product. At Evan-Moor an e-book and a paper and ink book cost the same.

4. How should I distribute e-books?

The most obvious answer is through your Web site. However, you should also be encouraging large and small retail websites to carry these digital books as well. Probably the most important part of this distribution is to establish a digital warehouse where all of your intellectual content can be kept securely. Evan-Moor happens to use a company called TecKnoQuest Inc., for our digital warehouse needs.

All of our e-books are downloaded from this digital warehouse to the ultimate consumer. The order may come from any website (even your own website), but the e-book is actually downloaded from the centralized warehouse. This allows you to keep a complete audit trail of who’s been selling your books; have a single place to make corrections to e-books; and to make sure the proper security encryption has been put on each electronic document as it goes out, which allows you to track copyright infractions. It also allows you to cancel access to your digital products to any retailers who have not paid their bills.

5. What format do I use?

Evan-Moor uses portable document files (PDFs), which are in turn read by Adobe Acrobat. Adobe Acrobat Reader is available at no charge from Adobe directly. There are special XML formats used for such book readers as Kindle and the Sony Reader. Since most of Evan-Moor’s material is reproducible by nature, the PDF format suits our business needs most appropriately.

6. What’s the future of the digital book?

Right now, most publishers (including Evan-Moor) are simply taking the production files we have for our books and transforming them into PDFs for distribution. To a certain extent this is a lot like putting radio shows on television. It really doesn’t take advantage of all the possibilities of this new electronic medium. There are lots of ways we could think about enhancing our e-books, including:

• Providing a clickable table of contents to immediately get to the part of the book that you want to go to;
• Giving the ability to annotate the pages with the teacher’s notes;
• Allowing the teacher to customize the content for his/her class;
• Adding elements to an activity or deleting them or perhaps even changing the spelling for territories outside the United States;
• Selling chapters or even a few pages of a book rather than the entire book;
• Selling compilations and collections of e-books in a bundle; and
• Making the book whiteboard friendly so that the book is truly interactive. This might also include providing worksheets that now become self-correcting in the digital context.

7. What are the benefits to a retailer for carrying an e-book?

There are lots of reasons that a retailer should want to carry e-books:

• No backorders;
• No inbound shipping charges;
• No warehouse costs;
• No receiving costs;
• No picking and packing costs;
• No order input costs;
• No inventory investment; and
• No limitation on possible product offerings. Since you don’t have to actually inventory the book, space is not a constraint. When selling electronic books, every retailer is capable of competing with Amazon.

8. What are the benefits to the ultimate consumer?

There are many reasons that teachers are going to want to buy supplemental materials in this manner:

• Get the book immediately;
• Do electronic word searching within the document;
• Store the book so it doesn’t get lost, and even back it up;
• Print exactly what you need when you need it;
• Avoid shipping costs;
• The teacher may have the ability to customize content for his or her individual classroom; and
• Use the book on a whiteboard, as well as printing it out.

9. What are the benefits to the educational publisher?

The first thing you want to do is look back at number 7. All the benefits of the retailer are also true for the publisher. But, in addition to that, there are more benefits:

• You’re repurposing existing editorial content to expand the market;
• You never need to discontinue a book. No matter how small the demand, that asset continues to contribute to the bottom line; and
• It will also give your editorial staff a new way to look at educational publishing. With the electronic book they are given a whole new set of tools for creating more effective content.

E-books and digital content are not just a new way of distribution–this is a whole new way to think about educational publishing.

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Bill Evans is one of the three founding partners and serves as CEO for Evan-Moor Educational Publishers, a company that has been “Helping Children Learn” for over 25 years. In 1979, Bill Evans, his sister Joy Evans, and their good friend Jo Ellen Moore began publishing titles on a part-time basis in a small two-car garage in North Hollywood, California. They had six titles. Through the years, Evan-Moor has grown to be a very successful company with more than 450 titles, a 40,000 square foot office and warehouse space, and more than 65 employees. Headquartered in Monterey, California, Evan-Moor’s products are carried in over 1,500 retail stores in the USA. Evan-Moor titles are distributed or licensed in 35 countries worldwide. Bill graduated from the University of Southern California in 1972 with a Bachelor of Arts in Communications on a full debate scholarship. In 1979, he received his Doctor of Juris Prudence from Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles, California. He continues to be an active leader, as the CEO of Evan-Moor Educational Publishers, as an industry expert, and as a good citizen, in his local community of Monterey, California.