Educational Marketer Newsletter

For its college publishing business, Macmillan (New York) has combined two strong trends—customization and open access—into a new service that if it catches fire will alter publishers’ roles, textbook authors’ roles and the textbook revision cycle, as well as sales and marketing in higher education publishing.

Macmillan in late February unveiled its new subsidiary, DynamicBooks, a platform for delivering and customizing digital textbooks. Macmillan initially developed a proprietary customization platform, which it piloted successfully, Macmillan president Brian Napack told EM. Then it teamed up with Ingram Content Group (Nashville) for a scalable e-book platform, tapping Ingram’s VitalSource Bookshelf platform and the Lightning Source print-on-demand capability.

DynamicBooks operates, much as Macmillan’s iClickers subsidiary does, to make it available to other publishers who may choose to use the service.

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