New approach to enhanced eBooks

From Digital Book World

An interesting experiment, with a pragmatic entry into the market.  It will be fascinating to see where it leads...

Digital publishing start-up, Erudition, beta-launches enhanced eBook series

Erudition, a new digital publishing start-up, has successfully beta-launched its first series of enhanced publications, Practising The Piano. The author, Graham Fitch, is one of the UK’s leading piano teachers and the series features the culmination of years of experience teaching pianists of all levels. The publications fill a gap in the piano literature with a focus on the art of practising, showing the reader exactly what to do in order to get the most out of their practice time.

A digital first approach
The publications are purpose-built for digital consumption using Erudition’s in-house content management system. The layout of content is optimised for onscreen reading on personal computers and iPads. Enhancements such as video clips, audio and additional resources are seamlessly integrated with content. Interactive “sliders” enable important concepts to be broken down and illustrated in a step-by-step format.

Direct sales model
Practising The Piano is marketed, sold and distributed directly to the reader via Erudition’s innovative digital fulfilment platform. The publications can be purchased and accessed via a dedicated website www.informance.biz or the author’s blog www.practisingthepiano.com. Readers view and interact with their content via a cloud library integrated with a web-based reading application which renders HTML5 content for online and offline consumption.

This direct model provides statistics and usage feedback not usually available to a publisher via third-party retail channels. “We’re thrilled with the results achieved so far”, says Ryan Morison, Director at Erudition. “We’ve received positive feedback from customers across the globe and over 70% of readers accessed the entire first volume within the first week of purchasing it.” New editions and volumes will be influenced directly by the feedback obtained from the beta launch.