"Lessons from Inside the Digital Silo" Laura Leichum's (Intellectual Property Manager, Georgetown University Press) presentation for the 2012 AAUP panel "E-book Nuts and Bolts"

2. Work with Your Strengths
0 Quantity has its advantages, but thoughtful placement
of key titles can really pay off.
0 Look for partnerships that best fit your content and
will reach core markets.

3. Pace Yourself
0 You don’t have to sign up with every new vendor that
approaches you right away or ever.
0 Create a strategy by taking a close look at their sales
models, their potential market, metadata & file
requirements to see how you can accommodate them.
0 Set realistic goals for how many new partnerships
your workflow can handle per year.
0 Timely delivery of quality metadata and files (as well
as updates) is absolutely crucial so don’t compromise
your ability to do so by stretching resources too thin.

4. Input and Feedback
from Colleagues
0 GUP has a Digital Strategy Group with representatives
from each department, meets about once a month to
discuss trends, new opportunities, and potential
workflow issues.
0 Check in regularly with other departments that might
feel side-effects of increased and/or varied nature of
digital publishing activity.

5. Not Just Pushing a Button
0 Digital Asset Management
0 Metadata Management
0 Vendor Management

6. Managing Frontlist Titles
0 Which titles will have ebook binds?
0 Who will make title selection for various vendors?
0 How will ebook ISBNs be assigned?
0 Who will make sure ebook vendors receive pre-pub
metadata?
0 When does an ebook become “active”?
0 And how can you get closer to simultaneous release of
print and ebook formats?
0 New Editions—is an ebook ever out of print?

7. Managing Frontlist Titles
0 Wait a minute, where did that dirty metadata come
from? Or who will check to ensure that titles have
gone live and that metadata is correct?
0 Ongoing metadata maintenance—for most vendors,
updates such as price changes and title removal are
still done via a manual process.
0 What are the Pros of supplying ePub files?
0 The Future—XML-first workflow for textbooks and
reference books, compositors supplying web-ready
PDFS and ePub?

8. Digitizing the Backlist
0 Who will verify e-rights or procure them?
0 Accurate title inventories are essential—back in those
early days of rabid content acquisition, selected backlist
titles were digitized by various vendors.
0 Who will make the title selection and based on what
criteria?
0 Who will create the digitization budget (time and money)?
0 Challenges of scanning/converting files (foreign
languages, tables & figures, quality control)
0 The Future—steadily chip away at backlist and one fine
day all viable backlist titles will be digitized and this won’t
be an issue anymore, or at least until they invent a new file
format that replaces ePub

9. A Case Study:
Our First “Chunking”
0 AcademicPub—hosts an online content library and offers a
service which allows professors to create custom course
materials that are available in print and ebook formats.
0 How to make title selection?
0 How to set chapter pricing? What to do about
frontmatter/backmatter or various scholarly apparatus?
0 Are the e-rights completely clear especially for deep backlist
titles?
0 How to supply chapter-level metadata?
0 Importance of keywords for search results in content library.
0 New sales model presented an opportunity to discover how we
might improve our metadata as well as test out a new revenue
stream.

10. Sales Reporting & Analysis
0 Ebook sales revenue, e-access revenue, subscription revenue,
short-term loan revenue, chapter sales revenue—I had to create
a spreadsheet just to keep track of all of these spreadsheets!
0 How will all of this revenue be recorded and how will royalty
payments be handled?
0 Vendor expansion into other countries can present more
challenges regarding pricing, sales data, and payments.
0 To make ebook revenue more tangible and visible within the
press, both monthly and quarterly ebook sales reports are e-
mailed to entire staff.
0 The Future—Currently, sales projections are made vendor-by-
vendor, but looking at how to make title-by-title sales
projections.

11. Making GUP eBooks More
Discoverable

12. Started including ebook ISBNs and list of
ebook partners in catalogs and on website

13. “e" logo and/or tagline used to highlight
ebook availability

14. Each book's detail page on our website
features links to retail vendors.

15. Top Ten Selling eBooks List on Website

16. 0 At exhibits, staff member has list of which titles are
available in ebook format and a sign using “e” logo
and tagline will be present
0 Have started using Ebooks.com Digital Comps to offer
ebook review and exam copies
0 The Future—special ebook pricing promotions?
Bundling? Selling ebooks via our website?

17. Are you Stuck
in the Digital Silo?
0 This seems like a question the whole publishing
industry should currently be asking itself.
0 Is having a single department or person in charge of
all things digital really a sustainable model?
0 Siloing may seem inevitable (especially at a small
press), but there are ways you can work at breaking
down the silo.