In this increasingly digitized world, adapting to digital publishing is imperative. eBook publishers need to create their digital content for multi-channel delivery. They need to have a distribution strategy in place to succeed and ensure their eBooks reach their target audience.
A Statista report states that the eBook market amounts to $15.7 billion and is expected to show an annual growth rate of 4.2% (CAGR 2020-2024), resulting in a market volume of $18.5 billion by 2024. These numbers are highly encouraging for eBook publishers. The perennially increasing dependency on the internet and convenient availability of smartphones have only promoted smooth access to eBooks on the go. Whether it is for looking up some research material or for the sheer pleasure of reading, people prefer the easy and quickest way – eBooks.
Leveraging eBooks in Education
Technological advancements have had a positive impact on the quality of education delivered. Students are mostly visual learners. For those who thrive on video content, infographics, diagrams, or follow along with a narrator, eBooks offer a more enriching learning experience that goes beyond the plain text. With eBooks, it is easy to expand student’s learning opportunities and grasping abilities. Read more about the importance of eBooks in education.
Leveraging eBooks in Employee Training
The purpose of employee training is to enhance employee skill sets and transform knowledge into productivity. Traditional training methods have had limited success in achieving that. They were designed for classroom training/ILT, and the traditional assessment methods don’t evaluate an employee’s ability to understand a concept correctly.
Also Read: Post-COVID Trends in L&D for Employee Training
On the contrary, the introduction of interactive eBooks in employee training has delivered in terms of knowledge retention, engagement, and productivity. Various studies prove that employees learn twice as fast with interactive eBooks. You can read more about the benefits of interactive eBooks here.
The digital era is witnessing exponential growth in the popularity of eBooks. To capitalize on this growing popularity, eBook publishers should smartly strategize the entire digital publishing process.
Related Read: How to Create a Custom eBook App to Reach a Wider Audience
Here are some success tips for eBook publishers
1. Connect eBooks with User Experiences
As an eBook publisher, you should strategize to make the reading experience as smooth and impactful as possible. User experience is a critical part of digital learning design. It should take into consideration the behavior, attitude, and emotions that your readers will associate with the eBook. Connecting digital content to a variety of novel features can be a good strategy.
Also Read: 10 Best ebook creation software
You should consider these pointers to ensure pleasant user experience.
- Be consistent throughout
- Be responsive – provide on-the-go learning in fixed and reflowable formats
- Design a clutter-free interface
- Provide seamless navigation
Related Read: 7 Must-Have eBook Features for Every Publisher
2. Create Device-Agnostic Content
The easy availability of smartphones and the Internet lets readers access content anytime, anywhere. Therefore, eBook publishers must adopt a device-agnostic content creation and delivery tool to make their eBooks available on all devices.
As an eBook publisher, you can also leverage some cross-platform eBook readers available in the market. It is wise to choose a cloud-based publishing platform that allows you to create interactive content, publish and securely deliver it with DRM protection on all mobile devices and operating systems. Here is a list of some of the best cross-platform eBook readers.
3. Use the Right Format
eBook publishers should choose a format that retains the competitive edge in the market while balancing the productivity and cost-effectiveness at scale.
Widely, there are two formats: fixed and reflowable layout. These formats have their own advantages and are used for different types of eBooks. However, it is the reflowable format that makes an eBook device-friendly. As an eBook publisher, you must be able to decide which is the best layout for your eBook.
The eBook publishers can also add multilevel interactive features, like augmented reality, virtual reality, video, audio narration, and gaming elements in the eBook. HTML5 and ePUB3 further allow publishers to make their eBooks platform and device friendly.
Related Read: How to Choose the Right eBook Distribution Platform
4. Protect Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)
At a time when content can be downloaded and shared across social media, traditional copyright laws have become obsolete. As an eBook publisher, you not only need to protect your revenue but also ensure regulatory compliance and copyright protection.
Implementing Digital Rights Management (DRM) is an effective way to protect your IPR. Thus, creating DRM protected eBooks is necessary for secure distribution. Retain complete control of your content – from ensuring who views it and how many times they view it and how your eBook, and what part of it, is shared or downloaded.
To survive in the digital space, it is not enough to publish eBooks, you also need to ensure that they are published on a platform that is DRM-enabled. This is an important step to avoid any unauthorized access, protect intellectual property rights, and generate rightful revenues for eBook publishers and authors.
5. Improve Engagement
Highly interactive eBooks drive high engagement. You must enrich your eBook with interactive multimedia elements that will offer a more life-like experience to the readers. Innovative advancements have made it possible to incorporate technologies like AR and VR to bring your eBook to life. Strategic placements of images, audio, and video content along with external reference links will keep readers engaged with the content. Here is a guide to creating an interactive eBook in 10 simple steps.
Adding social media features lets publishers get into constant interaction with the readers, seek their feedback, and ascertain their needs. As a digital publisher, you can use these inputs to deliver content in the style that resonates with the users’ expectations. Besides, you should also develop a distinctive brand and remain true to it. One way to do it is to maintain a very consistent point-of-view that makes you stand out amongst the others in the market.
In Conclusion
The advent of digital publication has changed the way publishers approach the business. Given the high customer demand for eBooks and the evident numbers of declining print sales and increasing digital sales, publishers have been increasingly converting their print content into eBooks. The use of various technologies and interactive media has provided eBooks an upper hand in terms of reader engagement.
However, in the race to the finish line, digital publishers need to ensure that their eBooks are not just electronic versions of the printed books, but are well equipped to survive and compete in a digital environment.
DISCOVER HOW AN INTERACTIVE EBOOK PUBLISHING PLATFORM CAN HELP YOU
Kitaboo is a cloud-based epublishing platform to create-publish-distribute interactive mobile-ready ebooks.
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