I mentioned that last weeks task was to try to sell a book. My team had a book based on bioethics and I decided to try to sell the book by relating it to relevant topics at the moment such as the Ebola virus and euthanasia, both which need to be looked at ethically as well as scientifically. Happily, I was informed that this was the correct way to try to sell a book, especially one that didn’t have a sexy title to sell itself.
Following on from this exercise, we delved into the world of Market Research in publishing. This class was designed to see how we gather market information. We were given the task of researching enhanced digital books. These are ebooks that have an enhanced aspect to it, whether it be interactive, audio or visual. There is a large market in America for these kind of textbook, especially medical and science. Inkling is one company that designs and creates these enhanced ebooks for the American market. Acting like we were working for MUP we researched who was doing the enhanced e-book in the UK, who we would want to market the book to and what area of education would work best. Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Hodder, Pearson, Open University Press are among some of the few publishers who do enhanced ebooks.
As a group we decided to focus on University students. We discovered that enhanced e-books can only be used on iBook and KindleFire. This means that we had to research how many students have access to these platforms and how many would be willing to use a textbook on an e-reader. Once this is established, we would then be able to sell the books to Universities and Lecturers showing the demand (hopefully). We used SurveyMonkey to devise our survey.
We are aiming for around 100 responses to be able to gain a good enough sample number to analyse the results. Tune in next week to see what out results are or (if you are a student) click on the picture on the right to do the survey yourself.
Master's Girl Blog 