APA announces TitlePage update, partnership with Thorpe-Bowker

As announced by Pan Macmillan managing director Ross Gibb at the Australian Booksellers Association conference on Monday 25 July, the Australian Publishers Association (APA) has released a statement regarding an update of TitlePage and a new partnership with Thorpe-Bowker. The full statement reads as follows:

In August of last year the APA's TitlePage Management Group proposed to the board the development of a consolidated Book Industry Supply Chain Solution for which they received unanimous support. The core principal is to develop a central corridor of technologies to bring efficiency and economies to the book supply chain and an ability to leverage the digital market opportunities.

The solution proposed was to link TitlePage, the largest of the Australian bibliographic price and availability services to booksellers, to other technologies in the supply chain.

Those being:

• a centralised e-commerce system for management of trade across the chain to the benefit of publishers, POS providers, libraries, booksellers and consumers;
• an EDI order tracking system accessible by publishers, booksellers and warehouses;
• integration with POD services to facilitate supply to booksellers and to their customers of single-book delivery for light-demand books, backlisted books not currently in stock, and the like, including fulfilment of small-volume orders from booksellers of books temporarily not in stock in warehouses pending print runs;
• integration of the distribution warehouses for orders placed into the system; and
• the integration of ebook warehousing, order processing and supply to consumers via booksellers through counter sales and their online stores.

To achieve this outcome the APA recognised that at the core of the solution three features were necessary:

• a robust and expansive hardware and software platform;
• an industry proven e-commerce system; and
• an industry developed and proven EDI system.

The APA entered into confidential discussions with Thorpe-Bowker and its parent company in the USA, RR Bowker, to propose the plan and development of a joint venture. It had been identified that Bowker had a new and robust platform in which the developments could reside; an industry proven e-commerce system in PubEasy; access and integration with PacStream, the current industry EDI system; an extensive history in the book industry, which is its business' core focus; and strong relationships with POS providers and resellers in Australia and New Zealand.

After months of extensive research of technologies (both the APA's and Bowker's and those of other parties), extensive development planning, confidential discussions with key stakeholder groups and negotiations, the APA and Bowker are only a couple of days away from ratifying a Heads of Agreement, thus formalising our partnership in this project. This agreement will be rapidly followed by the ratification of a Licence Agreement to Bowker for TitlePage and its new and enhanced iteration.

Once agreed the work will commence to complete the project, which is currently estimated to take 18.5 weeks.

Two versions of TitlePage will emerge from the development; TitlePage and TitlePage Plus. TitlePage will be much as you already know it but with some additional data and it will be enhanced to be able to service the New Zealand publishers and booksellers to provide them with NZ price and availability and access to bibliography on NZ produced books.

TitlePage Plus will incorporate all the e-commerce and EDI functionality and be the point of integration for the POS, POD, distribution warehouses, and ebook warehouses/distributors. The user interface for publishers, booksellers and libraries will be designed to be much like TitlePage but of course with the added functionality.

At this time discussions with other providers in the chain i.e. those of POS, POD, and warehousing and ebook facilitation, are either in some cases about to commence or continuing in confidence, thus we cannot provide any details of those discussions now, but may do so in the near future.

In due course booksellers will be advised about how they can integrate their online operations with the TitlePage Plus solution.

At this time we have yet to conclude any discussions on the topic of service fees to users of TitlePage Plus and this may still be delayed until about October.

We are very proud to have progressed to this point of agreement and there is much hard work ahead for the Bowker and APA teams. This supply chain solution will be a significant contributor to the future of the book industry in the ANZ region and like TitlePage has been, it will be globally unique. There are further plans for additional enhancements to the solution once it has had time to settle in, not least of which is the industry change to ONIX 3 and EPub3, (which format can ingest ONIX3 metadata); and the implementation of an Automated Quality Data Audit System.

The APA Board and Thorpe-Bowker believe this will provide a significant advance in speed to market of various book formats for consumers and supply chain efficiencies for the book industry in Australia and New Zealand.

Source: Bookseller + Publisher newsletter