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Interview
Textbook Publishing in a Flat World
8/6/2008
But when somebody makes a copy of that and modifies it, they are really doing it because they believe there's value for their teaching and for their student's learning in their class. We give them the option of either keeping that as a private version or adding it back into our catalog as a derivative of the original and explaining to their peers what it is that they have done. So that somebody who comes in over time might actually be looking at, "Oh, here is the original book, and here are 12 derivatives that have been created. I wonder if there's somebody that has done something that is more along the lines of what I would do, and I am going to start with their versions and then go from there."Schaffhauser: How does the author get compensated?
Frank: Students have made it very clear to us that at the right price point, they would pay for convenience. "Yes, I can read your book online for free," and about 10 percent of them tell us that is what they would do. But the rest tell us that they would buy some combination of a black and white version of the book for around $30; a print version; a full color version of the book for around $50; an audio version of the book for around $20.... The point is there's convenience. They can choose how they want to consume it, how much they want to pay. Our authors get a 20 percent royalty rate, which is higher than industry average on any sales, on any of those versions.
The other thing we do is create sales study aides around our books--things like podcast study guides for each chapter, Web-based practice quizzes for every chapter, animated solutions of complex problems with video instruction, mobile flashcards, all the key concepts for chapters that you can use digital flashcards for. We sell those iTune-style, where it's 99 cents whenever you need one, or you can buy a subscription for all of them for the entire semester for $19.95. We pay our authors 20 percent of that.
In the future, we believe that there are additional revenue streams available to us. For example, let's say I have 20,000 students studying from my junior-level accounting book, and I go out and find mid-sized accounting firms around the country that want to recruit but don't have the funding to put the recruiter on campus like the big four accounting firms do. Well, we could say to our student customers, "Hey, if you are looking for a job and you would like to be contacted by a recruiter that fits the place you are looking for, then you can opt in and fill out the survey about your career interests, what area of the country you want to work in, what accounting you want to specialize in, and we'll parse that data and pass it along to our accounting firm partners who are willing to pay for it, and they will contact you." Then our authors will get paid their 20 percent royalty on that.
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