MIT PRESS Success Story

Low Cost, Low Risk Solutions Enable New Business Models and Opportunities

As high-speed Internet access invades the average household, digital publishing is evolving into big business. Publishers are taking their content online to reach out to a wider audience across geographies. Most universities and libraries are digitizing books so that people can read samples online and then buy books online or buy a part of the book that they want as opposed to buying the whole book.

MIT Press, a renowned University Press in US, wanted to capitalize on the new electronic publishing technologies to provide superior value to their users. They opted for iPublishCentral, the flagship product of Impelsys, which empowered MIT Press to experiment with different business models at low cost and with little risk.

MIT Press

The MIT Press is a University Press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA). MIT is devoted to the advancement of knowledge and education of students in areas that contribute to or prosper in an environment of science and technology. MIT Press publishes approximately 200 new books a year, and over 40 journals in files like architecture, social theory, economics, cognitive science and computational science.

Challenge

MIT has commited themselves to both design excellence and the efficient and creative use of new technologies. Their passion for innovation has motivated them to continuously explore the electronic frontier. MIT wanted to use innovative and efficient electronic publishing tools to serve their readership. However, they were faced with following set of needs and challenges:

• Addressing different market segments without high risk or major investment
• Returning back issues into electronic circulation
• Reducing the development cycles associated with traditional online publishing

Solution

www.impelsys.com

MIT Press selected Impelsys' self service portal solution - iPublishCentral, to take their print content online. iPublishCentral helped MIT Press monetize their entire back list without the overheads of traditional online publishing processes, intensive development timeframes and infrastructure.

iPublishCentral

• Provided a digital warehouse to store and manage assets (titles)
• Generated a fully functional end user portal automatically without manual intervention
• Created online marketable content products and bundles
• Hosted features like search, virtual reader, bookshelf, user personalization and user communities
• Provided robust, fully integrated e-commerce suite to sell content online
• Retained the look and feel of the print book
• Offered individual and institutional subscriptions
• Provided advanced administration system to manage content, users and subscriptions
• Supported integrated and detailed usage reports
• Provided a platform to create viral marketing programs for web using widgets and ViewInside

iPublishCentral provided the quickest and most cost effective means for MIT Press to market, publish and sell its content online.

The iPublishCentral platform allows us to meet our readers where they are: online," said Gita Manaktala, Marketing Director for The MIT Press. "It's given us a way to move our book content online without the investment of time or money that would be required to build such a platform ourselves. Impelsys's investment in state-of-the-art tools and technology allows us to deliver the content and functionality our readers want without becoming a technology company. We can focus on what we do best: publishing high-quality content for scholars and professionals in our core fields.

Benefits

MIT Press went live in March 2009 with 400 niche titles for sale in the electronic form. iPublishCentral made the process of digitizing, marketing and distributing content online extremely simple, easy and fast.

iPublishCentral empowered MIT Press to:

• Experiment with different pricing models at low risk
• Manage, and control the portal content through a self-serve interface
• Offer their readers a choice of format and convenience
• Enhance their relationship with readers through book previews and a branded interface
• Reach out to global audiences with widgets that significantly enhanced the traffic to their portal
• Make informed decisions through in-depth reports that allowed them to track the number of unique visitors, the countries the visitors came from, the pages viewed and time spent on book preview pages and other information
• Enabled circulation of back issues electronically and helped them drive sales. Nearly 2% of unique visitors who saw the preview pages ended up buying the title