Here is a sample:
KENNEALLY: Right. And it changes the experience for the consumer. Obviously, they get the material, if not that moment as an e-book download, certainly, you know, within days, if not a day, in print form. But they’re getting access to a whole range of titles, millions of titles, in fact, that they simply wouldn’t have even thought were in their view before.
OLLILA: So a great example of that is what we did in Australia. In Australia recently, we opened a print on demand manufacturing facility in Melbourne that will serve the continent of Australia. Publishers throughout the world have authorized their content for distribution in Australia, and on the day that we opened that plant, we had over a million titles available for distribution in Australia. That’s more books than we’re – that have ever been available in Australia on an on demand basis for immediate distribution in history.Here is a link to the full transcript.
So one of the things that we’re proud of is the ability to bring content into Australia at very little cost to publishers, and exposing that content to consumers in Australia, where in the past, the distribution model would’ve been to sell the rights to an Australian publisher. The Australian publisher would have to negotiate with an Australian retailer. The book would have to go on a shelf. And by the time you get through all those steps, the cost of bringing that content onto the continent was incredibly high. So as a result, very little content actually got through to the Australian consumer.
Well, today I’m happy to say we have 5.5 million titles available in that database that, six months ago, we started with a million titles. So Australian consumers are really driving the bus in terms of availability of content. It’s not necessarily being driven by the supply chain.
1 comment:
Ingram is great. I publish through Lightning Source, so I know. But LSI needs to do a few things to internationalize sales and make their product even better.
1. Smart pricing. Tracking costs and currency fluctuations across a dozen or more countries and adjusting prices on dozens or even hundreds of books makes no sense. Give publishers the ability to set prices according to a set of parameters. Inflation in a country would automatically adjust prices.
2. Barcode the price. Make cover printing clever enough to print the current price in the selling currency. That'd make it like traditional printing.
3. Publisher's note. LSI already prints unique information on the last interior page. Give publishers the ability to use that space too, perhaps with a fixed size PDF. It could be used for whatever comes along after publication and updated easily. Possibilities include errata and a listing of similar titles.
--Michael W. Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle
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