Search and Discovery

It was naive for book publishers to think that their 'Google moment' would come on their own terms at their own pace. This may be in part because of the success and sophistication of Amazon.com as an online retail presence that had sheltered booksellers from the wider search and content consumption environment. But the days of central online storefronts as the primary vehicles for locating and consuming content are dwindling. In their place is an evolving commercial environment in which monetization follows the distribution of digital objects rather than distribution following monetization. Adapting such a commercial framework requires embracing electronic packaging for titles aggressively instead of becoming reliant on third parties such as Yahoo! or Google."

For Book Publishers, exposing their entire asset base to search engines like Yahoo and Google is problematic on many fronts. On the positive side, search engines:

- Index billions of web pages
- Point end-users to publisher content and books
- Provide a foundation to sell advertising
- Are preferred by end users

But they can also affect Book Publisher negatively:
- Publishers often don’t know what search engines are doing with Publisher content or their plans,
- Search Engines are generally not accountable for their use of crawled content,
- For many commercial uses, they do not accept licensing agreements,
- Search Engines are in the business of accessing content, putting them at odds with Book Publishers’ Rights and Permissions agreements,
- There are potential legal pitfalls on many sides.

There is an alternative! The LibreDigital Internet Digital Warehouse for Publishers offers a manner and methodology to work with Search Engines and still control and protect Rights and Permissions.

Digital replicas stored in the LDW can only be accessed in conjunction with our Rights and Permissions engine, an LDW component. The LDW accomplishes that by requiring that Publishers declare copyrights and access rights before the digital material is ingested into the LDW. Those Rights and Permissions are then permanently connected to the content as metadata.

Better yet, all Search Engine “crawls” access a Publisher’s content via the LDW DataPipe. DataPipe is integrated with the Rights and Permission engine and also controls access. With these two powerful tools, Book Publishers, for the first time, have ability to control search engine access and to use search engine crawlers to create demand and buzz for certain titles. Or to suppress certain titles, for that matter. DataPipe control is transparent and undetectable to Search Engine crawlers.

There’s one more vital aspect of the way the LDW manages Search Engine interactions – as an LDW user, you can also control the end user experience of how your title hits are served up against queries.

Three dimensions to controlling Search and Discovery

Because DataPipe provides a robust set of access controls, Book Publishers using the LDW can now have 100% control over how their content gets crawled, indexed and presented by search engines.
DataPipe and the LDW are transparent to the search engines crawlers. They do not recognize that their crawls are under parameters set up by the Book Publisher.
The Book Publisher now is also in control of the end user’s experience. That’s because the publisher can decide to serve up BookBrowse widgets, book cover thumbnails or even a direct link to a chosen bookseller’s website with a “buy now” message. If a publishers wishes, an entire eBook can also be served.