Bloomsbury Collections
A comprehensive humanities and social sciences research resource for university subscription.
The Opportunity
Commercialising existing academic books by creating a market leading e-book platform to sell them directly to libraries around the world.
The Solution
Create a market leading e-book platform to enable libraries around the world to benefit from thousands of Academic books.
Develop a clean, intuitive interface, which is optimised for mobile and tablet usage.
Provide a full set of features including:
- Full-text searching across all titles
- Browsing, searching and filtering by subject, date and series
- Chapter-level results to take users directly to the most relevant content
- HTML full text for frontlist titles; scrolling page image for backlist
- Links within the full text to endnotes and bibliographic references
- DRM-free chapter PDFs for printing and downloading (for customers who have purchased the content)
- Hyperlinks to find books by the same author, or in the same series or subject area
- ‘Cite’ feature allowing users to cite books or chapters in MLA, Chicago or APA citation styles
- Back-office features required by the library market such as multiple authentication methods, usage statistics and compatibility with link resolvers
Results
It launched in May 2014 and feedback was extremely positive, with very fast take up of trial versions by institutions. In 2015 revenues were already exceeding budgets and new collections are being added all the time, as revenues continue to grow.