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Abstract

When academic publishers first began making their content available electronically, most treated the different types of content as separate products. Publishers developed separate electronic platforms for e-books and e-journals. The reasoning for this was sound at the time; when electronic versions were first developed there were no obvious reasons for treating them differently from print. Print books and journals were handled by different departments and had different routes to market. At every stage of book and journal production and marketing a different set of players and processes were involved. All this is changing, driven by: developments in electronic publishing, expectations of end users and librarians for all content to be available online in an easy-to-find and integrated way, and the cost saving benefits to publishers of moving away from silo developments. Multi-product platforms, like Atypon's Literatum platform, meet the changing needs of the information industry, delivering a single integrated front and back end for all products and services, whether it be journals, books, databases or reference works.

How to Cite: Pal, N., 2009. Multi-product platforms: the 21st-Century solution to changing demands upon academic publishers. Serials, 22, pp.S30–S30. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/22S30