LibreDigital’s New Thrust Points to Second Generation of “eEditions”
Important Details: Newsstand, which has provided eEdition technology to the news industry, is now LibreDigital and it has appointed a new CEO, Russ Reeder. Founded in 1999, the Austin, Texas-based privately held company (in which the New York Times Company is a key investor) is one of several to produce e-editions of newspapers. Like Olive Software and NewspaperDirect, the company’s technology has long produced a gee-whiz reaction among publishers, as each of the companies has been able to transform a daily newspaper print product into a readable-on-computer replica. However, the e-edition business has never had a major impact on newspaper company fortunes, and each of the companies has pursued various niches to put the technology to work.
Now LibreDigital is reinventing itself and staking out a new path. The company takes its new name from its book division; LibreDigital was founded in 2006 to help book publishers make money in the digital world. In fact, the books business now contributes about 70% of the overall company’s revenues.
Important to the company’s future is a singular focus on helping publishers of newspapers and books do the heavy lifting of print-to-digital transformation. “Conversion, storage, delivery, tracking,” ticks off Reeder, a veteran of video-on-demand company NxTV and business rights management software company RightsLine, in describing the work processes underpinning LibreDigital’s new value proposition.
For newspaper companies, the new LibreDigital’s top focus is on powering Newspapers In Education (NIE) editions. These editions, usually sponsored by local companies, have long put newspapers in schools. NIE circulation computes to be about 1% of US newspapers’ daily circulation, and the new Audit Bureau of Circulation rule, going into effect in April 2009, will allow newspapers to “count” the NIE circulation, even if the sponsoring payment is only a cent per edition, rather than the current 25% of cover price rule.
The LibreDigital pitch, which has so far attracted 60 newspaper titles: replace your print NIE editions with electronic ones, saving newsprint, ink and physical distribution costs. Given the cost strictures publishers are experiencing, it’s an increasingly attractive proposition.
Its second newspaper-oriented priority is a newer one. Given the renewed promotion around Amazon’s Kindle reader and Sony’s reader products, Reeder believes the company can help companies take advantage of these emerging technologies.
Its third priority is the daily eEdition business, which it powers for about 170 papers, both through their own sites and through Newsstand.com.
Implications: Outsell believes that LibreDigital’s newer push into powering NIE editions is a good example of niching. Digital replica technology has long been a technology in search of a business. Why? Those who love and are habituated to print tend to be older, but being comfortable with print, they’re not wild about reading online. Younger people, as noted in Outsell’s News Users studies prefer online reading. They’ll go to the web, not to a separate snapshot of a publication, preferring the fluidity of the web, and of course the constant updating. So the fairly static e-editions haven’t been big winners, despite their advocacy by circulation directors.
NIE editions of course are a basic good idea, saving manufacturing costs. Most interesting is the the aspirational LibreDigital goal of helping publishers create new digital products. While Kindles and Sony Readers are limited in audience at this point, they are worth experimentation. In addition, LibreDigital’s “BookBuild” process, in which professors and students can build their own books, mixing and matching chapters from a number of titles, points to another news-oriented potential. The mixing and matching of news content, allowing readers to create more customized sports or entertainment products, for instance, may hold promise. Certainly, LibreDigital is just one of many software companies offering to ease publishers’ path forward, and its new market position, and intention, bears watching.