Our publishers get an account in which they see in real time the subscription activity on their titles. That means that we can also see real-time sales activity. So I keep a weather eye on the sales window when I am working.
This afternoon someone popped up and bought one title, and then 15 minutes later they came back and bought 4 more. I reckon that most of our sales are down to the strength and quality of the magazines … Keep Reading
One of the major advantages of a software delivered as a web service is that one can make steady improvements to the service, with (one hopes) no adverse impacts on the expectations of users. On average we have been tweaking and improving our service more than once a week in 2008. Here are the figures for the number of new site releases since we started:
2005 28
2006 32
2007 58
2008 76
Our big steps in 2008 included: shops/stores … Keep Reading
Keeping the list to manageable lengths, there have been five really important developments this year. Let us work back through the year which as it happens is pretty much the order of importance:
We started offering Institutional, or Site Licenses a year ago. This was not a part of our original business model, but the Exact Editions founders know that market from previous experience. We have, even so, been surprised at the strength of interest for consumer magazines. To judge by the range of libraries subscribing to our services (government departments, international organisations and schools as well as universities) there is a large global market for subscriber content delivered via IP to private … Keep Reading
Yesterday one of our publishing partners asked that the phone numbers in their catalogue should not be ‘live’. Incidentally, they were very pleased to have the ISBNs targetting their e-commerce engine, but for some reason not so keen on the phone numbers being immediately usable. Ours not to reason why….. the numbers were switched off. We have had such requests before, and it is not difficult for the database to switch phone numbers ‘off’, (ie to ‘non-clickable’) if this is … Keep Reading
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