Key Principles for Publishing for the Digital Future

Over the past year experts in the educational publishing industry contributed to the AEP series, “Publishing for the Digital Future.” From trends in the classroom, to marketing and pricing strategies, to professional development in the new era, the series focused on highlighting actions that publishers could take now. Below is a list of action principles culled from the series. You can comment on any of the principles or read the entries in this blog under the category Publishing for the Digital Future.

Why Educational Publishers Need to Hop on the Podcast Train

By Kim Kleeman
President, Shakespeare Squared

Enough iPods have been sold worldwide to arm almost half of the United States. Never before has a single brand so completely overtaken the market. The ubiquitous white earphones are present on every bus, train, and school campus across America. iPods can be used for pure pleasure, but we can also view them as a tool. As educational publishers, we may not be able to create that next amazing global gadget, but we can reap the benefits of its ever-present use, especially among today’s youth–our prime market.

While there are multitudes of ways educational publishers can use these technologies to their advantage, there are three distinct advantages for doing so: podcasting and vodcasting are cheap, easy, and accessible. With today’s technology, anybody can be content creators.

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.

Taking the Digital Plunge

By Matt Keller, President, Capstone Press

Capstone Press is a well-known publisher of children’s books for school and public libraries. Specializing in high-interest, non-fiction topics, we have created a very respectable niche in the education market over the last 15 years. Up until now, we have only published paper books and have done very little in ebook or other digital delivery options. For some time we have watched other publishers’ attempts to go digital and felt somewhat smug when their results were less than stellar–those results being sweet vindication for our inertia. However, looking at other industries’ (e.g., music, newspapers) rapid change in business models and the subsequent turmoil it caused made us sit up and take stock of our own situation. Couldn’t that turmoil also happen to us? Will we be the next in line of “where are they now” companies? Urged on by the greatest of motivators–fear–we decided to take action. If your company is now starting to look at digital delivery or is in the early stages, I offer the following points of advice.

Information Overload and Education Publishing Marketing

By Lee Wilson, President & CEO, PCI Education

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…‚” Herbert Simon – Nobel Laureate in Economics

Are you drowning in information? You are not alone. Our customers are experiencing an information overload. Marketers are screaming ever louder – the average urban dweller is exposed to 4,000 ads a day – and the broadcast model is breaking down and giving way to a conversation model (what some call Web 2.0). But the information is not to blame – we are.