We hit the ground running in January with preparations to support the launch of the #textbookrevolution in February. We reformatted all A4 one-up documents – I created the detailed list of documents for Philippa to work through, and assisted by adjusting crop marks of these for easy conversion. I also supported Philippa’s uploading and document processing efforts by sourcing pricing and metadata information. I finalised the DocRaptor compatible CSS, and bug fixes, and we went live with the DocRaptor adjustment.
Other activities included a call with Louise from Bookstorm, a meeting with Hetta from UNISA Press to finalise contracts, and finishing uploading of the backlogged documents.
The disappointing news for the month was from Harlequin: they declined a partnership with us, saying that they were unable to pursue this opportunity for the time being.
Arthur was away for a bit, and so I took his place in a Smart Monkey Interview with Russel Southwood:
Part of our focus on university prescriptions meant ensuring that prescribed English and Classics setworks that were already available on Paperight were reformatted. I drew up a list and progress chart for the reformatting of these texts, and Philippa began the process of scrubbing the HTML for those titles. In the meantime, I continued to hack away at the CSS for the automated HTML-to-PDF conversion, to fix compatibility issues that had arisen when we switched over from Prince XML to DocRaptor. And, I continued testing the PDF-to-Paperight-PDF document conversion software on dev. Oscar continued to work on the university prescriptions list, completing the data and making sure that it was updated for 2014.
On our other content-generation fronts: Andi began an internship with us, working on the grade 11 and 12 question bank. Our conversations with Susanne Collins’ agent were going well, and our next step was to secure funding for the project.
I tried to set up a meeting with OUP to discuss reading tree books and expanding their catalogue, met with Hyreath from Juta, and sent her our contract and additional information. We also had further contact with Elsevier, WHO and Jacana about contracts and content, and set up a CoreSource channel to deal with RHS doc transfers.
Near the end of December, I did a comparison of analytics from 2012 to 2013. This included an analysis of traffic to paperight.com, taking into account both the total visits (including recurring users) and unique visits. As the current version of the Paperight site only went live in May 2012 (marked in the data by a *), all data for August 2011–April 2012 is for the earlier version of the site.
Fig 1.1 Overview of total visits from 2011–2013.
In comparing data from 2012 and 2013 it is clear that:
There is an overall increase in volume of traffic from 2012 to 2013
There are two definite dips, and two peaks in site traffic each year
Dips occur in June/July, and December each year
In 2012, the peaks for visits occurred in February and March, and again in October and November.
In 2013, the peaks for visits occurred in May and October, with two smaller peaks also occurring in February and August.
2011
2012
2013
Jan
NA
369
1979
Feb
NA
1282
2499
Mar
NA
1613
2141
Apr
NA
1078
2812
May
NA
1211*
3999
Jun
NA
950
3041
Jul
NA
1349
2467
Aug
12
1398
3054
Sep
185
1264
2494
Oct
334
2319
4363
Nov
215
2460
2779
Dec
203
727
672
Fig 1.2 Figures for total visits to www.paperight.com from 2011–2013.
2011
2012
2013
Jan
NA
302
1454
Feb
NA
1120
2071
Mar
NA
1420
1663
Apr
NA
871
2076
May
NA
871*
3110
Jun
NA
567
2289
Jul
NA
875
1793
Aug
10
810
2455
Sep
166
964
1993
Oct
239
1765
3622
Nov
157
1857
2207
Dec
125
309
469
Fig 1.3 Overview of unique visits to www.paperight.com from 2011–2013.
In analysing the license sales for the period from May 2012 to December 2013, it was necessary to show the number of copies sold per completed transaction each month. Transactions marked in red are the result of inhouse testing, those in green are actual sales.
Fig 2.1 Overview of actual vs. test license sales from 2011–2013.
In comparing data from 2012 and 2013 it is clear that:
There are peaks in May, July (Pelikan Park and Silverstream) and September (Kwamatua High and Tambalethu) of 2013, both as a result of sponsorship deals.
While in 2012 we had fairly high organic sales in August and October, we did not see these happening in 2013. The majority of these sales came from Silulo branches.
Graph also shows that actual sales in June and July 2012 were roughly the same. Spike was as a result of inhouse testing.
A comparison of license sales data to site traffic:
Fig 2.2 Overview of site traffic vs. license sales from 2011–2013.
The most interesting thing to note here is that high traffic volumes do not result in high sales. In fact, both years, almost every peak in sales is in a month where traffic is lower.
2011
2012
2013
Jan
NA
NA
16
Feb
NA
NA
25
Mar
NA
NA
170
Apr
NA
NA
44
May
NA
22
398
Jun
NA
76
72
Jul
NA
121
861
Aug
NA
228
84
Sep
NA
82
1410
Oct
NA
186
44
Nov
NA
173
25
Dec
NA
20
10
Fig 2.3 Overview of license sales on www.paperight.com from 2012–2013.
For interest sake: here is a breakdown of sales per province.
Fig 2.4 Overview of license sales per province from 2012–2013.
We kicked January off by updating all the pricing on the Paperight site. One of our major pivots from the previous year was our decision to charge a license fee/service fee for all documents, and to have no free material available on the site (excepting, of course, those Creative Commons titles with a Non-commercial license). This included charging a nominal amount for all Paperight editions and matric past papers.
Initially, we had imagined the free content as a draw card, that would result in people also purchasing paid content. We found that while the former was true, the conversion was not happening. We speculated that consumers found the draw-card content valuable in itself, and that they would be willing to pay for it.
The balance between paid and free content on the site was skewed heavily in favour of free, and given that this content accounted for the majority of license purchases and downloads, we needed to ensure that we were making enough money to reach sustainability. Initially, we had imagined the free content as a draw card, that would result in people also purchasing paid content. We found that while the former was true, the conversion was not happening. We speculated that consumers found the draw-card content valuable in itself, and that they would be willing to pay for it.
We met with HMPG about medical journals, and continued our follow ups with Jacana and other publishers with strong African Literature lists. One of the latter included PanMacmillan/Macmillan, who we’d only recently contacted. We also began contract negotiations with Pearson, a process which would later lead to the revision of our standard contract for all rightsholders.
The month also included a lot of prep work, with continued work on Mampoer shorts, GetSmarter, and csv and document uploading — we had a bit of a backlog at this stage given all the prep work done by our freelancers (Caitlin and Craig).
Other work included my proofreading of the Paperight catalogue, organising with PASA for attending the London Book Fair, and overseeing authorship of Now What? By this stage its author Paul had drawn together a final draft and we’d sent it to nine Together We Pass affiliated students for feedback.
Publisher registrations
Thenosis Publishing (10/1/2013)
Mindset Publishing (15/1/2013)
College Campus (23/1/2013)
P-Ridge Press (29/1/2013)
Porcupine Press (30/1/2013)
PUO Educational Press (31/1/2013)
The inside story of our experiment in distributed print-on-demand
