|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
Consider DIY Textbook Publishing
04/18/08
Gaining control over your own course materials' print content could ideally position your store for the inevitable shift from print to digital delivery. "The person who owns and controls the content has got to be in the best position for how this is all going to play out," said Jennifer Berry, book division general manager, BYU Bookstore, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT.
Berry detailed how her store took the plunge into DIY custom textbook publishing—lifting sales while reducing costs to students—in her CAMEX educational session, Be a Textbook Hero: Begin a Campus Academic Publishing Program. "You don't need to have a huge store with unlimited resources to pull this off," she said. "You don't need a staff of 20. You don't have to be a typesetter or graphic artist."
The DIY route came up for discussion after the BYU Bookstore's survey of prices found ordinary textbooks' prices rising at two to three times the rate of inflation. "Titles that were going to the off-campus national custom publishers were increasing at double that rate even," said Berry, "so they were just really getting out of control really fast."
Students bemoaned the limited buyback on custom-published texts. One $95 freshman textbook was bought by 1,200 students a year, but the store couldn't buy copies back because the custom publisher perforated every page.
At the same time, faculty complained that national custom publishers locked them into a one-size-fits-all model that didn't offer the services they desired. There were also worrisome intellectual property issues, with faculty signing over control of content to outside entities without any oversight by the school.
Custom publishing on campus seemed to offer the best solutions for everyone. The store had been producing its own course packets for 15 or 20 years, so the decision was made to expand that to publishing textbooks. The effort focused on print, since a survey of students indicated that only 4% wanted e-textbooks.
BYU Academic Publishing launched in June 2004. Berry prefers the term "academic publishing" to "custom publishing" because it better reflects how intertwined they are with the university's academic departments and mission. "We keep it all here," she said. "We keep the money on campus for the benefit of the campus community."
Wherever possible, they use free public-domain photography, sharing access to an online stock photo site with another campus department. When they need to shoot specific images, they employ a student photographer, often using friends or family as free subjects. Similarly, illustrations are done by mechanical engineering or industrial design students, at a rate far below what a national publisher would have to pay a professional.
On every project, after costs and billable staff and student hours, Berry adds in a margin. Even with that, "in an apples-to-apples comparison we will always be cheaper," she said, estimating that BYU Academic Publishing titles cost at least 40% less than competing books of similar content.
For one class of about 100 students, BYU's hardbound custom text priced out to about $25 per book. The professor heard that and said, "There's no way you can make it $25. My students won't take it seriously unless it's at least $35." So they obliged by bumping up the cover price.
The first textbook BYU produced, the 500-page Physical Science Foundations, sells for only $49.75 new, $37.50 used, returning $30 to students at buyback.
Berry cautioned that academic publishing is time consuming and resource intensive. Physical Science Foundations took a year and a half to produce. But the rewards can be big. Publishing their own titles has boosted the BYU store's sales. "In the four years almost that we've been doing this we've had double-digit sales increases every year," she said.
But there is another catch to custom publishing: If you look at the closest competing book to one of BYU's own titles, that book might sell for more than $100, which means the store would have more gross-margin dollars from that book than from its own cheaper title. "So you do have to keep that in mind as far as what the goals of your area are, what the expectations of your administration are, and so on," Berry said.
"We do make up some of that loss of gross-margin dollars in better sell-through," she added. "Our sell-through on these titles is about 10%-15% better than our sell-through on regular texts. Of course, the most obvious reason for that is we're the only ones that have it: They can't go anywhere else. They can't go to the Internet."
Berry discovered that editing faculty can be "tricky." For Physical Science Foundations, the seven faculty authors involved told her to edit their copy so their individual styles would merge together neatly. "What I learned very fast was faculty, when they want you to edit their work, they don't really want you to change anything," she said. "They just want you to say, 'This is the best thing I've ever read.'
"I've gone to a more gentle approach to editing now," she added.
BYU Academic Publishing doesn't take the faculty's copyrights to the printed material. The faculty agree to use a certain number of copies of the textbook for a certain number of years. As soon as 98% of the books are sold, either a new agreement is signed or things wrap up. Berry said faculty find that arrangement much more congenial than the contracts they've had with national custom publishers.
She added that one of the most important policies for success is to offer the custom publishing service to any class size, not just the big freshman requirement that 5,000 students take every semester.
"It might be tempting to say you've got to have a big class size or it's not worth it to us," she acknowledged. "But I've found that our best marketing is with the faculty. If we don't discriminate based on class size, they will be our friends for life and they will refer other faculty to us. So even if one project is small and barely profitable or break-even or maybe a little unprofitable, we'll make up for it."
The improved ties with faculty also spill over into other matters. "We have the faculty come to our defense in terms of pricing," Berry noted. "We've had faculty sticking up for us: that we're decent, good people, that we're not just about making money."
The program has also sold some of their textbooks to other schools, which adds another revenue stream and gets the BYU name out in the market.
Any store interested in exploring academic publishing should see if grant money is available. BYU Academic Publishing hasn't applied for any grants yet, but is looking around now to see what's there.
And when student demand for electronic course materials rises, BYU Academic Publishing already has its own DVD burner.
—Michael von Glahn
Sound Off!
Share your views on this topic with other readers. Just fill out the form below and then click "Post Message." You will need to "reload" or "refresh" your browser to view your comments.
Name:
E-mail:
Message:
To post a message, type the characters that are displayed in the above image.
|