Bookboon Uses Advertising to Bring Open Access eBooks to Market | Open Equal Free

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-06-28

Summary:

“Bookboon started in Denmark. It expanded rapidly to Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands by 2007 and then, the following year, to the UK where the commercial idea blossomed.  The COO credits the site’s popularity to the universality of the English language and its ability to reach broader audiences. The publisher currently has strong plans to create a market in Asia through its sales offices in India, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The company’s blog states that developing countries currently account for 50% of ebook downloads. In the United States, some colleges are adopting Bookboon’s open access textbooks, with about 70% using the ebooks as secondary literature and 30% using them as primary texts. The ebooks tend to be black and white with color only in diagrams and hyperlinked advertisements located at the bottom of every two to six pages. However, the technical and extremely direct nature of the texts may detract from their adoption stateside (where professors often seek the most engaging books possible). The advertisements are, perhaps, one of the most interesting features of the Bookboon business model, for the ads are targeted towards professional or student audiences: ‘We finance our textbooks with a low number of employer branding adverts: in essence, we are getting the future employers to pay for the student textbooks.’ Given the potential for employers to endorse some skill sets and knowledge bases through textbooks via this system, if it’s adopted on a large enough scale, the arrangement may have implications for the materials being taught.”

Link:

http://www.openequalfree.org/bookboon-uses-advertising-to-bring-open-access-ebooks-to-market/13747

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.usa oa.south oa.netherlands oa.oer oa.uk oa.textbooks oa.germany oa.denmark oa.sweden oa.china oa.bookboon oa.singapore oa.advertisements oa.books oa.asia

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

06/28/2012, 17:15

Date published:

06/28/2012, 17:41