CITIC Publishing House CITIC Flying Book: Traditional Publishing House's Digitalization Experiment

The digital publishing boom is coming, and companies with Internet genes are entering the digital publishing industry in large numbers. In contrast, traditional publishers seem to be slow to respond and helpless in coping with the user needs and market changes of the emerging media. In the face of this unstoppable wave, some publishers adhere to the traditional publishers, more focused on the content, do a good job of every paper book; some publishers set up a multimedia department to test the waters of digital publishing.

CITIC Publishing Co., Ltd. is an early adopter of the development of clients to expand the field of digital publishing publishers. 2010 May, they set up the "New Media Division", and then launched the "CITIC Flying Book". At present, CITIC Flying Book's client mainly covers IOS and other mainstream cell phone operating systems, and will be the content of the book batch online. For CITIC Publishing House, CITIC Flying Book is an experiment and attempt of traditional publishing in electronic publishing.

"If you look at the old thinking, e-books seem to be just a simple copy of the paperback reading on mobile devices, but in fact, not, there are a lot of opportunities in this is not we can imagine with the old thinking, do not try to never know the market in the end how, only to do, to try to know what kind of opportunity exists. " CITIC Press digital media center editor-in-chief Huang Peijian said.

Competition drives reading experience to do better

Digital reading in China after several years of development, whether it is China Mobile, Han Wang, Shanda, or other platforms, the improvement of the reading experience has a lot to do with the hardware, software development and typography technology. Starting last year, many domestic digital publishing companies began to work on the reading experience, and CITIC Flying Book is no exception. They are constantly tracking and learning from the experiences of others in the industry.

To be specific, in terms of fonts, most of the body fonts of traditional books are in Song font, and different fonts are used for covers and titles. The e-books in CITIC FeiLin, on the other hand, use Founder's Lanting Black, Song and Regular fonts. The use of these three fonts is closer to the experience of reading a paper book in terms of reading experience. In order to better restore the reading experience of a paper book, CITIC Flying Book implements details such as a gray box for prompts, pictures to click on to open, italics to show quotes, and fonts in different colors.

This constant self-requirement in details is due to the competition among peers. "It's good for the industry to promote each other," said Huang Peijian. "A year ago you couldn't see any books with a good reading experience on Apple's platform, readers and practitioners didn't have a high demand for the matter, and felt that as long as they could read the words, there would be some relatively simple presentation schemes. Now MultiView, Tang Tea and us, are all learning and competing with each other, so that we will make this experience better."

In addition, CITIC Flying Book is also constantly figuring out what kind of content is suitable for readers on Apple's platform. Currently on this platform, their best-selling book is A Brief History of Race in America (which sold several hundred copies in two months). "My own feeling is that better-known paperbacks sell better; after all, people make judgments based on their past experiences when trying something new. For example, the books we're selling well now, Women Are Not Ruthless, Their Position Is Unstable and The Great Game, are all very best-selling books for CITIC over the past period of time." Huang Peijian also found that as far as the current situation in China is concerned, there are not many platforms geared toward high-level reading, and the Apple platform will probably be the place where competition for quality e-book content and a good reading experience is more intense.

Publishers should have to grasp the layout and production of e-books

Traditional publishers are involved in digital publishing, and technology is a weakness. CITIC's e-book production tools are based on open source data developed independently. The client was originally outsourced to others to do, and now the upgrade and maintenance is also done by themselves. The client was originally outsourced to others, and now the upgrades and maintenance are done by ourselves. At that time, CITIC did not have the client CITIC Flying Book, and thought it was very simple to make EPUB files, and other cooperative terminal operators needed it, so it was given to the outsourcing company to do it. After doing so, the documents were passed on to the e-book distribution channels. However, when CITIC started to do Flying Book client by itself, it realized that the EPUB files made by the outsourcing company were not qualified. The electronic content is not a simple conversion, many details need to spend effort to do, such as footnotes, in the paper book is a very simple thing, but in the e-book to do a good job of this detail, there are instructions, the need for a special person to focus on the completion. The same goes for many other details in typography.

Whiteberry wouldn't have had such a profound feeling if he hadn't been personally involved. He says, "After doing it myself, I realized that EPUB doesn't work without review. And if the work of document production is not done by themselves, directly dumped to the channel, change a channel also need to find another person to produce, for the channel is also doing duplication of work, and after doing it yourself, this is instead a content resource of the publishing house." It is the same as saying that the most basic content of the e-book is grasped in the hands of the publishers themselves, even if there are new changes in the future, can be based on this for it to do extra points.

"My understanding is that publishers should control the layout and production of e-books themselves. Other aspects are of course a matter of opinion, including the user experience plus points for things. And of course the user depends on how you think about it. Why do some newspapers and magazines do their own electronic editions? Because users are an important resource for them. If a publisher just follows the traditional thinking of throwing e-books into the channel, there is no contact between it and the users. Because of CITIC Flying Book, we have direct contact with the user, so the user's information, reading habits of the grasp, are our resources as well as assets that can be used in the future. If we throw the users directly to the channel, we will be subject to the channel in the future."

Publishers should actively participate in the marketing of e-books

The marketing of traditional books requires the use of media such as newspapers and magazines, as well as channels such as posters in ground-level stores. With the popularity of online bookstores, more and more marketing has moved online. The marketing of e-books, on the other hand, is even more dependent on the Internet. Readers can click directly from various pages to purchase and download e-books. Therefore, in Huang Peijian's opinion, publishers should not only control the quality of e-book products, but also actively intervene in the marketing of e-books. CITIC Flying Book will leverage the microblogging of celebrity authors to do more exploration in the past and future.