MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
November 5 – November 12, 2009 Edition
S&S to Sell Health Chapters and Snippets Online
NEW YORK, NY/Authorlink News/11/05/09–Simon & Schuster this week unveiled a new e-commerce model for how consumers can find and purchase information important to their health. The first offering will allow visitors to "The Doctor Oz Show" section of the website, www.ask.doctoroz.com to ask specific questions and receive answers from a number of authoritative medical sources, including the YOU books by Dr. Michael F. Roizen and Dr. Mehmet C. Oz.
Simon & Schuster announced the new service in association with Sharecare, Inc., which offers Q&A content at www.ask.doctoroz.com
As part of the launch, Simon & Schuster has created an e-commerce solution that is a natural extension of the information seeking process, and that enables users to easily purchase individual e-chapters of the books from which the answers to their questions are derived, all without leaving the www.askdoctoroz.com site. Users also have the option to purchase an entire book in digital, physical, or audio formats.
"We are tremendously excited about this new ability to offer contextually relevant, bestselling content from our catalog on specialized sites," said Ellie Hirschhorn, Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of Simon & Schuster. "It represents a transformational shift from current trade publishing models, and means that consumers may no longer have to purchase an entire book when perhaps a chapter or two will provide them with the answers they are looking for, or if they are looking to sample parts of a book before making the decision to purchase the entire work. This opens up a new world of opportunities for where and how our digital content can be distributed and sold, and we plan to expand both the chapter selling model and use of our e-commerce widget to other content categories."
At launch, Simon & Schuster's Free Press is making available e-chapters, complete e-books, physical books and audio for all the YOU titles on its list. In addition, YOU: The Owner's Manual by Roizen and Oz (HarperCollins) will also be available in e-chapter and full book formats, facilitated by Simon & Schuster's eComm widget. Simon & Schuster and Sharecare intend to offer the new e-commerce capability to other publishers and authors as more books are added to Sharecare's catalog of medical experts.
The individual chapters of the YOU books from Free Press, in DRM protected PDF format, sell for $2-$3 based on the number of chapters and standard SRP for the complete book.
About Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster, a part of CBS Corporation, is a global leader in the field of general interest publishing, dedicated to providing the best in fiction and nonfiction for consumers of all ages, across all printed, electronic, and audio formats. Its divisions include Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing, Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, Simon & Schuster Audio, Simon & Schuster Digital, and international companies in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. For more information, visit our website at www.simonandschuster.com
