Our Experience

What We Built

A tool that integrates an industry database with an online interface to enable transactions and ecommerce (uses ONIX system)

The Challenge

The Australian Publishers’ Association had a longstanding challenge of trying to create a system that would connect booksellers to publishers. HotHouse was commissioned in 2004 to create a tool that would provide a single search repository of book titles available to Australia as well as offer publisher information. In addition, the tool needed to establish a user-friendly service and be cost effective for booksellers and publishers.

The HotHouse Solution

The first step for HotHouse was to get all publishers in the Association on board with the project and to ensure their business processes would be fluent with the new system. With that established, we then proceeded to build a database that allowed for a vast quantity of book data to be stored and accessed through a login. Booksellers could then download title information into their systems and search for titles on a number of fields. For publishers, we provided the ability to search, upload and edit their own titles, create ONIX records online and obtain reports on activity by title.

Results

Titlepage.com now powers over half of the resellers in the Association – with over 3200 booksellers and suppliers using the service and a listing of over 902,000 titles.

Publishers have benefited through reduced strain on their customer service centres and Booksellers have since been able to get immediate, accurate information on price and availability of books around the clock, 7 days a week.

TitlePage is wonderful and saves us an immeasurable amount of time. I think it is the best thing to happen in the 20 years I have worked in the industry.Griffiths Bookshop