Despite early doubts, booksellers at the Book Expo in New York report marketing benefits from posting searchable versions of their titles.New York—The recent release of the Google Print Service grabbed the attention of attendees at the Book Expo here Thursday. A panel discussion featured several publishing executives who reported on their experiences with posting searchable full-text versions of their titles for viewing on Google.
While some of the publishers encountered early resistance within their organizations over fears of piracy and improper use, all eventually found that the benefits of making their context searchable and viewable far outweighed any risks.
"Everybody trusts Google [Inc.]," said Kate Everingham of Arcadia Publishing, a firm she described as "the most successful unknown publishing company in America." Everingham found that even readers who still fear the Internet and would not give their credit card information to online merchants will trust the results they see on Google.com, and will make a purchase.
Most of Arcadia's customers are over 45 years old and somewhat less immersed in technology than younger Web surfers, she said.
"We knew when we started publishing that we were going to have to work extremely hard to bring our products to the market. But technology has, in fact, caught up with us. It's now possible for people to do their own research and to read their local paper online, but bearing in mind that our market is 45 and older, these are people who came late to technology."
She's been quite pleased with the results she's seen from the program, she said: "We've seen our Web site sales explode."
Read eWEEK.com editor John Pallatto's commentary here on what publishers stand to gain from Google Print.
Tony Sanfillipo of Penn State University Press described how his organization integrated its workflow by using the same Adobe Acrobat files for Google Print that it submits to Lightning Source Inc., its print-on-demand vendor. When asked if he ever needed to tweak his files to make them more readable on the screen, he said no, adding, "If it's annoying enough, they'll buy the book."
Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press stressed the power of online search in selling back-list titles. "Seventy-five percent of our sales presently come from our back list," he said, even though most marketing funds go to front-list titles.
"That becomes a challenge when you have such a big back list … and because we're a global publisher, we have a fair number of titles that we sell here in the United States from Oxford University Press, U.K. So we not only have to market our own titles, we have to market the U.K. titles as well."
Online search seemed to answer some critical marketing questions for Oxford. "We had to ask ourselves, 'Is it possible that we could have customers find our content on the Web and not just in an online bookstore? Can that content actually sell itself?'"
Oxford maintains an extensive online presence, although it also funnels some sales to commercial booksellers such as Amazon.com Inc., Borders Inc. or Barnes & Noble Inc.
"We run a fairly sizeable online bookstore right now. The reason we run that bookstore is that we want to be able to drive business to our Web site and capture customer information so that we can market to people," Schnittman said.
He said he sees Google Print as part of a comprehensive marketing process. "Our end game isn't to be a bookstore, it is to own the customer."
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