The interview is in a article in Publishers Weekly about gift books:
To capture the consumer’s attention, publishers must find innovative ways to tap into the market’s upsides, says Abrams: “There’s great opportunity to make quality content available to a much broader audience, and one way of doing that is going to be electronically.”
Abbeville recently began its experiment to translate an illustrated title into electronic form with the second edition of its bestselling New Father series. “We found it wasn’t as seamless as a normal trade book might be, because it is illustrated and because we do focus on presentation and design,” says Abrams. The first pass revealed several errors, necessitating tweaks to software and process. The final product is now available, as is the third edition of The Expectant Father. Abbeville plans to release 10 more backlist e-books in spring 2011.
Abrams views the benefits of electronic content as twofold: “The first thing is price; a lot of the cost of an illustrated book is in the paper, ink, and binding,” he says. “Secondly, it’s the access to the illustrations—it’s a lot of fun to be able to play around with fine art, to zoom in, enlarge, do your own cropping.” The digital medium also offers advantages when it comes to searching, he says: “Thumbnails are meaningless in your normal trade book but fabulous in a digital format—you can browse or select chapters very easily, quickly, and meaningfully.”
