Page 150 - Electronic Commerce

Selling on the Web

Legal, Academic, Business, and Technical Content
Many digital content providers specialize in legal, academic research, business, or
technical material; however, all types of content are now available online. Whether you
are an engineer who needs to find out if an idea you have has already been patented by 125
someone else or a physician checking on a potential prescription interaction, you can find
a digital content provider online who wants to fulfill your need.
LexisNexis offers a variety of information services for lawyers and law enforcement
officials, court cases, public records, and resources for law libraries. In the past, law firms
had to subscribe to and install expensive dedicated computer systems to obtain access to
this information, but the Web has given LexisNexis customers much more flexibility in
how they access their subscriptions.
Many academic and professional organizations, such as the American Psychological
Association and the Association for Computing Machinery, sell subscriptions and
individual access rights to their journals and other publications online. Academic
publishing has always been a difficult business in which to make a profit because the base
of potential subscribers is so small. Even highly regarded academic journals might have
fewer than 2000 subscribers, most of which are university libraries. To break even,
academic journals must often charge each subscriber hundreds or even thousands of
dollars per year. Electronic publishing eliminates the high costs of paper, printing, and
delivery, and makes dissemination of research results less expensive and more timely.
A number of academic information aggregation services, such as ProQuest Dialog and
EBSCO Information Services, purchase the rights to academic journals, newspapers, and
other publications and resell those rights in subscription packages to schools, libraries,
companies, and not-for-profit institutions.
Dow Jones, a business-focused publisher of newspapers such as The Wall Street
Journal and Barron’s, was one of the first publishers to create a Web site for selling
subscriptions to digitized newspaper, magazine, and journal content. In addition to
publishing a variety of financial information services online (including MarketWatch and
SmartMoney), Dow Jones operates a comprehensive online content management and
integration service called Factiva, which gives companies the ability to manage internal
information and integrate it with external information to track company and industry
news, perform analysis of acquisition candidates, and manage the company’s risk in a
dynamic business environment.
Not all technical content is business related, and the Web provides a way for technical
content developers to reach retail customers. For example, persons who do scrapbooking,
knitting, sewing, and other craft activities can purchase and download digital files for
patterns, fonts, stock photos, and electronic files that can control hobbyist machines
(die-cutting, sewing, knitting, or quilting).

Electronic Books
Another type of digital content sold online is the electronic book. Companies such as
Audible and Books-on-Tape (now both owned by Amazon.com) sold audio editions of
books for many years, first as cassette tapes, then as CDs. Today, electronic books (that
can be read or listened to) are available for dedicated devices such as Amazon.com’s

Copyright 2015 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.