CEO's Desk

The first quarter of 2010 was eventful for both, the publishing industry as well as Impelsys. The February 2010 IDPF eBook sales numbers were astounding with sales of $ 28.9 million, a 339% increase from February 2009. It is interesting to note that just the first two months of 2010, breached the previous highest quarter sales which was the fourth quarter of 2009. To me these numbers are incredibly exciting and mean one thing - that the industry is nowhere close to slowing down. We at Impelsys believe that we are closer to the tipping point than ever before.

The first few months of the year were busy with several exciting trade shows taking place. It started with the launch of a number of dedicated e-reading devices at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in early January, closely followed by the Digital Book World Conference, O’Reilly’s Tools of Change Conference, the PSP Conference as well as the Vilnius and Bologna Book Fairs. At these events, we got to interact with and listen to several industry thought leaders such as Tim O’Reilly and Peter Collingridge, and bring back what we learned and apply it to our company. We also spoke at several shows and showcased our experiences in helping our publishing clients initiate their online strategies and presented what was working for them. We highlighted the phenomena we see with publishers leveraging social media to market and sell their content online. We also showed how publishers are slowly moving from being a B2B to a B2C company by building direct relationships with their end consumers.

Another much anticipated event was the launch of the iPad. The question of whether the device would succeed or not has been put to rest with more than a million units being sold within the first month of its launch. Many argue the pros and cons of this device and wonder whether there is a place at all for it. I think that this device has most certainly defined a whole new category as well as redefined reading and content consumption. It will be interesting to see the total size of the tablet market once HP, Microsoft, Google, Lenovo, Dell and the others bring to market their devices. All this competition and innovation will only help the publishing industry and will get us closer to the tipping point. There has been much written about the iPad’s technology and its features, to me the most innovative feature is the touch technology. The experience of not using a keyboard or a mouse or a stylus to interact with the device makes it so much more natural. We were lucky to get our hands on the iPad early and have started working on figuring out how to leverage our solutions to the device. We are excited about the possibilities that we can offer our publishing customers in terms of what they can do with their content on these devices. Over the next several months we will be making announcements on how our solutions can leverage the success of the iPad.

To conclude, I’d say the first quarter of 2010 was a significant one for Impelsys in more ways than one. We were elated to learn that iPublishCentral was selected as a finalist of the Software & Information Industry Association’s CODIE Awards, in the Software as a Service category and we eagerly await the final result which is due to be announced towards the end of May. We are all set to launch our partnership with Bowker when Bowker relaunches their MyIdentifiers (www.myidentifiers.com) service with our widget solution. We are also very excited to launch the Sesame Street eBook offering in the latter half of May. Apart from these major initiatives, iPublishCentral continues to get more and more publisher adoptions from around the world.

I hope you’ll find our newsletter enjoyable and educational. If you have a digital publishing success story you’d like to share with us for a future issue, or have any questions or comments, I look forward to hearing it. Do get in touch with me at sshariff@impelsys.com

Sameer Shariff
Founder & CEO