Cleveland, Ohio—based B2B e-vendor OverDrive has long focused on a providing publishers and retailers with a comprehensive suite of back-office digital services, and the strategy seems to be working. Along with such firms as Lightning Source and Texterity, OverDrive can provide text conversion, support electronic commerce, provide digital marketing applications, set up e-distribution and supply DRM technology, all while staying in the background. In an e-publishing landscape littered with failed vendors, OverDrive can claim profits and a history of steady, realistic growth in an industry recovering from unrealistic expectations.
In a conversation at PW's offices recently, Steve Potash, CEO and founder of OverDrive and president of the Open E-book Forum, along with Pamela Turner, director of OverDrive's Content Reserve, offered their views on electronic publishing. Potash was quick to note OverDrive's long tenure—"15 years of servicing the publishing community"—and credited his success to his company's ability to "offer it all. We're true partners who have shown we can create a profitable revenue stream from e-publishing."
He also took note of "mistakes" made by other companies. He criticized "subsidized conversions and exclusive deals"—offers by some now-failed vendors to convert text to digital for free. He emphasized, "We never chased IPOs. We were after long-term efforts to make e-books work."
He noted that OverDrive is an international operation, with publishing and retail partners in the U.K., Spain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland and elsewhere. But mostly importantly, Potash and Turner emphasized their firm's ability to "set up services to sell." OverDrive, they said, can put bricks-and-mortar retailers online or provide an e-commerce infrastructure for any content-oriented Web site, while "we remain behind the scene," Potash said.
The firm is also marking the one-year anniversary of its e-Book Technology Center in Montego Bay, Jamaica, which employs about 200 people.
OverDrive's text conversion services can produce "complex books, STM titles with columns and graphs," said Turner. OverDrive provides publishers with "24-7 access" through a secure logon. "Publishers can track their jobs online," she explained, and can communicate with OverDrive staff and "check covers, ISBNs, whatever, in real time, online."
Content Reserve, which Turner directs, is a secure online marketplace where retailers can register and review content from nearly 400 publishers and publishers can select from more than 100 registered retailers, said Potash. There's no charge to register for the service, said Turner. Publishers can house their content securely on OverDrive servers, which link to retailers and provide the downloads for sales. "Publishers don't have to contact each retailer individually and a single file can sell to hundreds of stores." And through its services as an e-distributor, "we act as a superstore for retailers, " Potash said. OverDrive offers a customized version of Content Reserve called Private Reserve that allows publishers such as HarperCollins, which was the first major publisher to participate in the service, to keep direct control over choosing and managing the retailers that resell its e-titles.
Future of E-books
When it comes to the format of e-books, Potash acknowledged that MS Reader and the Adobe e-book reader will likely "dominate most markets." He said that Microsoft's forthcoming tablet handheld—it looks like a laptop without a keyboard and will run a full Windows operating system—will expand the possibilities. "These devices will be a significant catalyst for e-books. They will rival paper in [reading] quality and will be very useful in the classroom," he said.
In fact, OverDrive has partnered with Follett, the college textbook wholesaler and retailer, to create an e-bookstore for academic titles and college-oriented trade titles. "The e-bookstore is never closed, and through efollett.com, Follett can reach four million students at any time," he said.
"We've always been conservative," said Potash, who claimed his company's slow but sure strategy was just a part of his legacy as a Cleveland guy. "We're not after unrealistic expectations. We're looking for ways to make money."
