Roger Rosen, CEO of the educational publisher Rosen Publishing, has a slightly different philosophy than many others who are taking their print publishing companies into the digital age: “We don't want to be technology leaders,” he says. “We are content providers. We want to serve the client.” Despite that modest claim, Rosen Publishing has put itself on the leading edge of educational publishing for the k—12 space. Since 1950, the company has created books to supplement school curriculum in all subjects, and over the past few years, the company has adapted database technology to make its content available to schools in new ways using old rules. Rosen explains, “We have found that when we apply our basic print thinking to most digital scenarios and recognize a different method of delivery, we've been very successful.”
Rosen says he found the need to go digital liberating. “At the point that we recognized we wanted or needed to cross the digital divide, we had a moment of redefinition. We came to jettison that hardening of the categories and think about information as available through any number of delivery systems. Since we weren't in the business of innovating the delivery systems, we asked the marketplace how they want this content delivered,” he says.
Rather than spending a great deal of time and money developing a new platform, Rosen used the existing database model to get the company's content right to its customers. “We started with our strongest print holdings—teen health and wellness—which we had been publishing since the '50s,” he says. “We thought this material would be well served by a database where the material could be searched. We did a huge amount of R&D about how teens search.” Access to the company's first database product, Teen Health and Wellness, is sold on a subscription basis to libraries and schools. Introduced in 2007, the database “has been enormously well received,” Rosen says. (It was picked as one of the “must have” products for librarians by PW sister publication School Library Journal, which called it a “groundbreaking database.”) Twelve other subject-specific databases are scheduled for release throughout 2010.
Beyond databases, Rosen has other digital products in the pipeline. In September, the company will make all of its books available as e-books, which can be wrapped in DRM, bundled, licensed for various kinds of users and hosted on a client server or on Rosen's hosted service, which will be rolled out soon and will enable searching across all the books.
This year, Rosen also launched a joint venture with Encyclopaedia Britannica—Britannica Educational Publishing—through which Rosen is creating new books using Britannica's content, along with new material, to weave Britannica's “sometimes very diverse content” into a seamless book narrative. The venture will produce 100 Britannica books each year; the first 30 launched in January.
This kind of deal is key to Rosen's strategy, and he has other agreements in place with Audible and Brilliance for audiobooks. “We very much believe in strategic alliances,” Rosen says. “There are so many opportunities. Partnering with colleagues that have special access to special markets will be more and more the way to go, because content will be available in so many different forms and therefore can be pushed out to special niche markets.”
In a further show of commitment to the school and library markets, in June Rosen formed a joint venture with Gary Spears to acquire Gareth Stevens Publishing.
Despite digital inroads, Rosen thinks the future of education will still involve print books: “The e-book model is growing, but it's not in place the way print is,” he says. Rosen sees a multiplicity of factors affecting how schools use books and e-books in curricula. “There are schools that aren't appropriately wired, and a lot will depend on government funding,” he notes. “Just as there are very many different learning styles, there will be many reading styles. I still believe strongly in print. Print will be around for a long time. I think there's a place for all of it.”
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