Earlier this month Apple released a remarkable bit of news: just 28 days after the release of the iPad, its much hyped and anticipated multifunctional touch-screen device, the company had sold one million units—a milestone achieved in less than half the time it took the company to reach with its debut iPhone in 2007. What's more, in the same time period, new iPad owners downloaded more than 12 million apps from the Apple App Store and 1.5 million books from the newly unveiled iBookstore.
The announcement has reverberations throughout print publishing, but it has particular resonance in the reference category, where the ubiquity of the Internet has already been challenging publishers to re-evaluate methods for delivering content—and in some cases has substantially influenced the content itself. Reference publishers have been aggressively digitizing content in increasingly innovative and successful Web sites, apps, and e-books, and they are working to distinguish their print formats with content that is either highly specialized, unique, or quirky. The Apple news is sure to accelerate this trend.
Content Is Still King
For some segments in reference, the move to digital has been a natural progression. "Our core audience has always been made up of scholars and students," says Damon Zucca, executive editor of reference at Oxford University Press. In the realm of academia, the practically wholesale movement of scholarly journals to the Web has created the demand for other information to be equally accessible. "At this point the audience pretty much expects content to be available online, Zucca adds.
Oxford has already had success with subscription-based sites devoted to the in-depth examination of single topics—from Islamic studies to the Bible—that use the connectivity of the Web in innovative ways: a relevant entry on the Islamic studies site (oxfordislamicstudies.com), for example, will hyperlink to the text of the Koran, and historical information on the African-American studies site (oxfordaasc.com) is accessible via a visual time line (in addition to a simple keyword search).
The development of those sites laid the groundwork for the house's ambitious launch last month of the Oxford Bibliographies Online (aboutobo.com), a major compendium that asks an expert in a given field to guide users to the best bibliographic information available on their topic, be it a work of print, a journal, a digital archive, or a blog. It's meant to be a major hub for research—connecting subscribers to vetted sources across all media. Says Zucca, "It brings the material alive in a way that's just not possible in print."
All this is not to say that Oxford has abandoned the printed word. This June it will release The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology, a three-volume edition that will survey conflicts from 500 to 1500 C.E. And in July, through a partnership with Berg Publishers, it will publish The Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion by Joanne B. Eicher, a 10-volume soup-to-nuts review of the subject. Both works, however, will also be available in e-book form with digital-only features, like searchable maps. "The question isn't really, are print books still viable for reference," says Zucca. "It's, how can we deliver our content to ensure that it remains viable." He highlights a tenet that's key to Oxford's approach: content is still king—it's merely the vehicle of delivery that's shifting. "If you are serving a genuine need, your publishing will find an audience."
Apps-olutely Important
Emerging technologies have been causing plenty of shifts at Wiley. Over the past year, the company has seen extremely positive results developing reference apps for the iPhone. "Last summer, when Apple sold its billionth app, it felt like the trend had hit a tipping point," says Shauna Yule Brasseur, associate director of online marketing. "[It] just began to feel like an obvious fit for the For Dummies brand." This bestselling series now has 10 apps live, and the debut of iPad has only put those efforts into high gear. There are another 10 apps set to come online in the next few months, including Basic French for Dummies, and Basic Italian for Dummies. "For publishers used to the long lead times of print, the speed in which an app is created is so amazing," says Brasseur. "You can go from the launch of the process to the App Store in six weeks."
These ancillary products have a reinforcing effect for their print counterparts. "Often the conversation when discussing these programs turns to cannibalizing book sales," says Brasseur. "But the customer you intersect with online or in the App Store is not typically the customer you meet in the bookstore, and if the info they find is useful, then they will go and buy the book." But the relationship from print to digital is also symbiotic; it's the better-known print versions in the For Dummies series that give the apps legs—otherwise, it would be a challenge for them to stand out in a crowded marketplace (there are more than 200,000 apps available in the App Store).
"It's a place where having a brand is important," says Brasseur. "People are willing to pay for tested content from a name they recognize." Despite widespread conventional perception, they are also willing to pay more than 99 cents—some apps in the Dummies series sell for $9.99, and test prep products in Wiley's other categories sell well at $34.99. In the App Store, Brasseur says, "You can change your price to find your market, and you can keep experimenting to find the sweet spot that gives the content to consumers at the price they are willing to pay."
This shortened feedback loop—from publisher to customer and back again—is another aspect of digital formats that companies are finding exciting and appealing. "We're constantly adjusting the content in response to consumer suggestions," explains Joyce Pepple, associate director of e-content at Wiley. "Within hours people have told you what they think of a given app, and they in turn are really accepting of updates." It allows for a process of constant fine-tuning—resulting in an app that gets better audience reviews, and consequently, bigger sales. "It's entirely different from print, where once a book goes to press its price and content will remain static," says Brasseur.
App development is also underway at Berlitz; the company currently has several language dictionaries and travel apps available in iTunes, and it's busy developing more for iPhone and iPad, as well as programs for the Kindle and other smartphones like the Android and BlackBerry. "There's no question that publishing is moving rapidly into the digital era," says publisher Vincent Docherty. "We see emerging technologies as an opportunity to expand our customer base even further, provided the business model makes financial sense."
While it may seem that the general direction in reference goes from print to digital, sometimes digital content can inspire print titles, much in the same way that blogs have inspired bestsellers in other categories. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has had just such a success with its 100 Words series. "Its origins are in a list we developed of the words every high school graduate should know when we published the fourth edition of The American Heritage High School Dictionary," says Christopher Leonesio, managing editor for reference. "We posted it on our site and saw a huge spike in hits and an enormous amount of media attention."
100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know soon followed. The series, which already numbers more than 10 titles ($5.95 each), will continue to grow this year with 100 Words Every Middle Schooler Should Know (July) and 100 Words Almost Everyone Mixes Up or Mangles (Sept.). Leonesio credits the popularity of the books to the fact that they're accessible and easy to digest. "There is a great advantage to being able to access a dictionary very quickly on your computer," he says. "But I think there's always going to be an audience for language books as long as they offer helpful, useful information in a fun way, presented at a nice price point."
Fun is the operative word at Ulysses Press, which has two forthcoming books that capitalize on that idea and were also inspired by Web sites. Tweet This Book: The 1,001 Greatest Quotes of All Time in 140 Characters or Less (Dec.) gathers bon mots from an idiosyncratic collection of personages ranging from Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf to Hunter S. Thompson and Tupac Shakur. The quotes are all Twitter-ready, meaning they conform to the micro-blogging service's 140-characters-per-post space constraints. Listverse
.com's Ultimate Book of Bizarre Lists: Fascinating Facts and Shocking Trivia on Movies, Music, Crime, Celebrities, History, and More (Aug.) compiles the popular site's hodgepodge of oddball facts all in one place—who knew sulfhemoglobinemia can cause you to actually bleed green or that Einstein was a philanderer? "Tracking down the most popular Web sites that would make quality books continues to bring us success," says publicist Karma Bennett. But Ulysses is also taking advantage of another big trend in reference: titles that haven't gravitated to the Web or been otherwise digitized tend to either convey a quirky sense of play, have a particular hold on highly specialized information, or both.
Enduring in Print: Becoming Specialized
"Our books aren't typically stocked in the reference section of bookstores," says Workman editor-in-chief Susan Bolotin. "But we are publishing substantial works of information that strive to be the go-to source for a particular topic." For Bolotin, the most important requirements for a book to pass her muster are a distinct point of view and authority. "We're separating the wheat from the chaff for our audience," says Bolotin, pointing to a title from her fall list. Love That Dog! Using Positive Reinforcement to Train the Perfect Family Dog by Dawn Sylvia-Stasiewicz and Larry Kay (Oct.) is coauthored by the trainer of Bo Obama, aka the First Dog. Says Bolotin, "She's the most carefully vetted dog trainer in the world, and she takes you from buying or adopting a puppy to sorting out behavioral problems in a senior dog. It's hard to get that kind of passionate, singular information gathered in one place on the Internet."
That goes ditto for The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published by Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry, and The Game Lover's Bible by Leigh Anderson, both of which claim to be the last word in their respective topics. As Bolotin puts it, "When your computer pops up information from the Internet, it's hard to know it's accurate unless you recognize the source."
"I think the editorial viewpoint has never been more important in this category," Sterling editorial director Carlo DeVito concurs. "If you're going to do reference, you've got to come up with something clever—you need someone who can bring real value to the selection of information and the arrangement of content." The house's Quamut line consists of laminated guides with straightforward design covering how-to advice on subjects ranging from digital photography to estate planning. By the end of the summer the guides will number 36, and the company has plans to release an additional 12 every season. "When you Google something, you can easily get overwhelmed by search results," says editor Joe Rhatigan. "Information from Quamut can be trusted—it's written by experts, fact-checked, ad-free, and concise."
The Internet as counterpoint is something of a recurring theme. Publishers still see print as a way of distinguishing content from a medium that can often overload with unverified information or skim the surface of topics without much depth. "Reference is so ubiquitous on the Web," says Avery's editorial director, Megan Newman. "It's brimming with medical information, but much of it is unreliable, unsourced, and unfiltered. Books like ours give readers one-stop shopping." Prescription for Nutritional Healing, Fifth Edition: A Practical A-to-Z Reference to Drug-Free Remedies Using Vitamins, Minerals, Herbs & Food Supplements by Phyllis A. Balch is a bestseller on alternative medicine that gets an A–Z update this fall. Tapping into the concerns of a large aging populace—a baby boomer turns 60 every 7.6 seconds—The Longevity Prescription: The 8 Proven Keys to a Long, Healthy Life by Pulitzer Prize–winner Dr. Robert N. Butler proposes strategies for wellness in the later years.
A similar approach to research also goes into pop culture tomes, such as The Francis Ford Coppola Encyclopedia and The Encyclopedia of Sports Films, both coming in August from Rowman & Littlefield's Scarecrow Press imprint. "The Internet hasn't changed the areas in which we publish," says senior editor Stephen Ryan. "It's just encouraged us to produce titles that dig deeper and provide more comprehensive information."
That hold on specialized info is something Scarecrow has in common with other houses that have found an enduring format in print. "As a publisher of regional reference works intended for a trade audience, I've been pleasantly surprised at how well the market for print has held up," says Mark Simpson-Vos, acquisitions editor at the University of North Carolina Press. "Ten years ago, when we were planning the publication of The Encyclopedia of North Carolina, I would have said it was the last reference work we would ever publish in a print-only edition—but The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture is still going strong in print." The series, whose first volume debuted in 1989, will see two new installments this year: one on urbanization and another on sports and recreation. The North Carolina Gazetteer: A Dictionary of Tar Heel Places and Their History, originally published in 1978, will also have a revision, with more than 1,200 new entries. Says Simpson-Vos, "Customers tell us they still want printed works because they enjoy the experience of browsing the pages and discovering surprises."
Sometimes readers also appreciate a book that fills a gap. The Dictionary of 20th-Century Communism from Princeton University Press is the first major reference work on the subject available in English since the end of the Cold War. "Princeton focuses on reference works for our core audience of students and scholars," says Anne Savarese, executive editor of reference. "In fields where we already have a strong or growing list, a major reference work boosts our presence and visibility and broadens our reach." In that same vein of providing valuable information to researchers and scholars is Malevich—Painting the Absolute, a four-volume study on the Russian painter and creator of Suprematism, Kazimir Malevich, to be released by Lund Humphries in June. "There will always be a strong need for current, reliable information," says Christina Parisi, executive editor at AMACOM, which will publish The AMA Handbook of Due Diligence and The AMA Handbook of Business Writing: The Ultimate Guide to Style, Grammar, Punctuation, Usage, Construction, and Formatting. "The advantage that publishers have is access to rich sources of content." This is especially true when that content is valuable to distinct audiences, like those in business management.
There is also a strong showing in the category for publishers that pair rich sources of information with compelling visuals. In the case of atlas publishers, it's not surprising that print is still primary. "Atlases in book form still have a huge appeal in trade and education markets," says Nelson Yomtov, executive editor at Langenscheidt, which publishes Hammond. This year the Hammond World Atlas, 6th Edition gets a complete update that includes new photography and the latest satellite images of the world's geographical features.
Elsewhere, the pairing of graphics and knowledge still has traction. "We still enjoy strong consumer support for our reference list where it combines beauty with utility," says DK reference publisher Jonathan Metcalf. "For DK, the USP [unique selling proposition] is usually our visual approach—explaining a concept through detailed art work and informative annotation and captioning so the consumer can understand it quickly and easily." DK's Natural History is a visual survey of the science authenticated by the Smithsonian Institution and covering more than 6,000 species. The Complete Human Body by Alice Roberts is illustrated with computer graphics and the latest microscopic imaging.
DK isn't alone: "From National Geographic's perspective, illustrated reference is still active and viable," says Nina Hoffman, executive v-p of book publishing. "But having a dip-in/dip-out book full of interactive elements, cross-references, fast facts, and vectors connecting things on the page to the larger world is appreciated for the lesser amount of time it takes to inhale the information." Through this approach to interactive design, Eyewitness to History: From Ancient Times to the Modern Era relates world events through archival photographs, period art, and even graffiti. Global Birding: Traveling the World in Search of Birds is a general how-to that covers the avian populations of six continents in text and pictures.
Off the Well-Trod Path
The concept of easily digestible short bursts of information that a reader can quickly tune in and out of is echoed in another trend: books taking a fun or offbeat idea and culling content accordingly. Following up on the popularity of its New York Times Knowledge Books series, St. Martin's has drawn on that trove of content to produce The New York Times Presents Smarter by Sunday. This October release is based on the premise that there is a recognizable group of topics in literature, science, art, religion, philosophy, and politics that all educated people should be familiar with today—and sets out to present them in more than 100 lessons meant to be digested in two-hour weekend increments over a year's time.
"Our quirky reference books have been a great success over the past two years," says Bill Wolfsthal, associate publisher at Skyhorse, which produces such titles as Words Gone Wild: Fun and Games for Language Lovers, a collection of riddles, puzzles, and word plays, and Common Phrases and the Amazing Stories Behind Them, which examines the origins of oft-used figures of speech.
Quirky's the word for Avon A's just published The Modern Girl's Guide to Sticky Situations, which follows up on author Jane Buckingham's The Modern Girl's Guide to Life and ... to Motherhood. Says HarperCollins executive editor Cassie Jones, "With Jane's Modern Girl books, we're striving to provide useful information in a really fun, accessible, gift-worthy package. Jane's background as a trend researcher gives her intimate access to the interests and concerns of young women."
At Reader's Digest, the Blackboard Books series focuses on easy-in/easy-out titles covering everything from grammar to mathematics—The Classics is a primer on the canons of literature, while E=MC2 tackles the world of physics. Says associate publisher Rosann McManus, "Readers of any age want something they can just pick up, have fun with, and learn something from." n
