Industry Overview 2009
Industry Overview | Primary Competitors
Since 2005 the industry has experienced a wave of
mergers and acquisitions. Media Services Group purchased CisPub in
2005 and followed this with the purchase of Cats Pajamas in 2007. IBS purchased Bookmaster and in 2007 Vista acquired Ingenta in
a reverse merger to become a publicly traded company known as
Publishing Technology.
In our opinion:
Small publishers with sales under $1M are turning to
Anybook, Publishers Assistant, DashBook or Easy Royalties.
Publishers Assistant, Anybook and DashBook are order processing
solutions. Anybook is stronger in distribution management,
Publishers Assistant is strongest in on-line sales (and as of May
2009 its Free!) and DashBook offers a modern user interface.
Easy Royalties is for publishers looking for a solution that can
handle complex royalty contracts.
Anybook and Publishers Assistant have the largest market share in
this segment with over 150+ clients each.
The market for small publishers with sales of $1M to $10M is
dominated by competition between Cyberwolf's Acumen product and
Media Service's Élan and Cats Pajamas products.
Cyberwolf's Acumen product has over 180 clients. Acumen is a totally integrated ERP system.
Most vendors consider
Acumen to be the market leader in this segment and Cyberwolf
consistently signs up more new clients each year than its
major competitors combined. Media Services Group has about 200 book publishing
clients spread out among its four product lines; Bookworks, CisPub, Cats Pajamas
and Élan. The Cats Pajamas product line (acquired in
2007) is focused on meeting the demands of publishers with sales of
$1M thru $5M with solutions that start as low as $10K. About
160 publishers use Cats Pajamas. Élan is a software as a service
solution that provides publishers with a turn-key ERP software
solution accessible via a web based interface. IPUB is a
competitor in this market and offers hosted and standalone
solutions. They have 18 clients. In May 2009 Klopotek, long known
for providing royalty, editorial and production management software
to large publishers enter this market segment with an affordable SaaS (Software as a Service) solution.
EasyRoyaltiesUSA entered the US market in 2009 targeting publishers looking for stand-alone royalty software that
complements their existing financial management systems. Their most
notable client in the United States is New York's Museum of Modern
Art. Their American client base includes publishers of romance
books, religious books, non-fiction texts and DVDs.
In the middle market of publishers with sales in the range of
$10M thru $50M no one book publishing software solution
dominates the market.
We estimate that 80% of book publishers in this market use
non-publishing specific software including custom designed
applications and off the shelf ERP solutions.
The introduction of new book industry standards, the increasing
market share of on-line resellers and the growing importance of
digital products has led more publishers in this market segment to
switch to publishing specific ERP solutions.
In this market Bookmaster, Klopotek, and Vista as the
primary competitors due to their scalability and large client base.
From our point of view, Bookmaster has the strongest distribution
oriented solution, Klopotek the strongest editorial focused solution
and Vista the strongest online sales oriented solution in this market
space.
in 2007, Acumen enhanced its software with advanced warehouse management functionality
and a rights marketing module. This increased its appeal to
larger publishers with distribution operations. In 2009 we expect that Acumen's offering will be
enhanced with tighter integration to MS Office as they upgrade
systems to the SQL version of 4D.
In 2008 Media Services became more competitive for sales in
this market segment with the rollout of their Microsoft .NET based
Élan hosted solution and an MS SQL upgrade path for existing CisPub,
Cats Pajamas and Bookworks clients.
Media Services has uniquely positioned itself in the
market as a vendor that offers a best of breed royalty & rights solution that works with any of the standard accounting packages - such as MAS90,
Great Plains and QuickBooks.
KnkPublishing, a provider of Microsoft Certified Solutions to the
publishing industry signed a distribution agreement with
Solution Dynamics in the United States. The entry of a system
that is integrated with with the Microsoft Dynamics NAV line of
products could is the wild card for the 2009 marketplace. In the
first six months of 2008 they signed up two publishers in the United
States - Augsburg Fortress and the US Naval Institute.
At the high end of the publishing software market (for publishers
with sales of $50M thru 1B+) Bookmaster,
Klopotek, and Vista are the primary competitors with no one solution
having a dominate market share.
From our point of view IBS Bookmaster is stronger in distribution
and warehouse management, Vista is stronger in online book marketing and
Klopotek is strongest in editorial and production management.
When publishers look for a total ERP solution the choice often
comes down to IBS Bookmaster and Publishing Technology's Vista
solution.
Bookmaster is enhancing their marketing functionality with
improved tools for CRM and rights marketing.
The strength of the Klopotek offering in North America has
increased with their purchase of the Global Turnkey Systems and
access to Global's experienced implementation staff.
With representation in China Vista has signaled its intention to
expand in the largest market that is untapped by rival vendors.
In 2008 we saw Virtusales competing against Klopotek, Vista and
IBS Bookmaster in Europe with a modern application built on .NET
Page 1,
2, 3 of
3
Updated Dec 20, 2009
Home |
Book Publishing Software |
Site Map |
