Marrying Marketing Science with the Front Lines: One Book Publisher’s Winning Combination

KNOWLEDGE@WHARTON—The rise of the Internet has been a boon to the National Academies Press, or NAP, the book-publishing arm of the National Academy of Sciences. But by the start of this decade, the promise of the web also posed some potential pitfalls. In 2001, the leading scientists on the board of the Academy were suggesting that NAP executive director Barbara Kline Pope take advantage of new technologies to offer its books on the web in a downloadable PDF format — free of charge.

According to Pope, the scientists told her they wanted the ability to disseminate the scientific information as widely as possible, explaining “that we could give away PDFs for free and it would build knowledge around the world. They were also saying to me, ‘Don’t worry about your business model because people will still buy printed books.’”

But Pope wasn’t convinced. So in 2002 — as befitting a leading scientific publisher — she obtained outside funds for hard research, retained two academic marketing experts and called upon the tools of marketing science. The researchers developed a study showing that free online PDF-format books would have cannibalized existing print sales on the order of $2 million a year — a potentially crippling blow to the publishing house. Read article.