After cofounding three data intensive startups and spending a year doing research, David Wilcox realized that business professionals "do not need another book as much as they need rapid, easy access to the critical concepts that have already been published."
As a result, Wilcox, who cofounded Data Resources, which was acquired by McGraw-Hill in 1979, is about to launch MeansBusiness, a comprehensive database of conceptual information from hundreds of business books. MeansBusiness.com will make its Internet debut in November; the company is currently in negotiations to partner with several large business sites.
Patrick Lucci, v-p of communications, told PW that MB.com's mission "is to provide access to conceptual information--the ideas, concepts, principles, theories, models and methodologies--published in books and journals."
Hiring freelancers to write the annotations, MB.com has created 12,000 brief extracts, ranging in length from one to five paragraphs, from 400 business books. The extracts cover nine main subject areas, from Knowledge & Learning to Leadership & Change. These are then divided into a narrower range of categories. A third level of sorting breaks them down even further into the 900 key concepts that form the MB Concept Guide.
To date MB.com has signed licensing agreements with 10 business publishers, including HarperCollins, Harvard Business School Press, McGraw-Hill and John Wiley, and is in discussions with Perseus, Random House and Simon & Schuster. Patricia O'Hare, v-p for international development for Jossey-Bass, one of the first publishers to sign on with MeansBusiness, noted, "I've never seen editorial brought so well to the Web in such a rich way. We really think they've got a great model."
As Wilcox sees it, rather than cannibalize book sales, MB.com will "create electronic products that are precursors to the book purchase." MB.com will operate on a subscription model. It also plans to raise revenue by selling groups of extracts, or "suites." Preview suites with one key concept per extract will cost $8, and full suites will sell for $12 (comparable to the price of a trade paperback). The company will share the revenue from suite sales with its online partners, who will also benefit from related book sales at their sites.
