We are pleased to introduce Matthew Jones, VP Content Acquisition & Strategy at Perlego - a rapidly growing eBook subscription platform for academic content. In this interview, Matthew tells us about how Perlego can help solve major problems that publishers face today and its journey to becoming a "one-stop-shop" for students to access a wide range of academic and non-fiction books at an affordable price.
Q1: Tell us a little bit about your background?
I was born and raised in Hong Kong. At the age of 18, I came back to the UK and studied Geography at the University of Southampton. Not long after graduating, I taught the same subject at different schools around the UK. After that, I stepped away from teaching to work in the newspaper publishing before joining Perlego back in 2016 as the Head of Business Development. In April 2018, I took over the VP Content Acquisition & Strategy role to lead a rapidly growing team searching for exciting new publishing partners to join the Perlego platform. In addition to negotiating new content, I also oversee all publisher relationship management, PR, and joint marketing activities. As part of the leadership team, I am also very strategically involved in all growth and fundraising activities in the wider company.
Q2: In your own words, how would you describe Perlego?
Perlego is the eBook subscription service for academic content. It is often compared to other global subscription services in press and media and frequently dubbed ‘the Spotify of textbooks’. The reality is that there are many dissimilarities with Spotify and other subscription services in terms of the commercial model. Fundamentally, we aim to create a "one-stop-shop" for students to access a wide range of academic and non-fiction books at an affordable price.
Q3: What is the nature of your relationship with the publishers?
One of the core values of Perlego is to create a fair and equitable model for publishers to access a portion of the market that hasn’t been available to them before. Many people don’t realise that publishers lose a lot of revenue due to piracy and second-hand book sales. These are core, underappreciated issues for academic publishers. We also provide publishers with data on usage that is not available elsewhere on the market. If you buy a book using traditional channels, such as in-store or even online, you don't know student's profiles and how they use their books. Publishers are most excited about the capacity to work with us on gaining long-term insights into exactly how readers use their books, and who reads them? It can seriously benefit their bottom line in the long-term if they can create better, more engaging content based on the data that we provide. It's now not enough in any content industry to be commissioning content on incomplete data. You need to make solid and profitable bets on content, and you need to know how users use that content.
Perlego can deliver affordability and convenience for the students but keeps them on a legal and monetised channel to prevent the growing segment of privacy and second-hand book sales. That's why publishers so value us.
Q4: What is the unique selling point (USP) of Perlego? Why does it stand out?
Traditionally, the design hasn't been put at the forefront of this kind of service and platform before. According to our research, the number of people who would say that the eBook is their preferred reading format is relatively low considering the digital use of resources amongst the student audience. People often still prefer their book in hard copy because companies have not prioritised user experience. We want to lead the way with a strong focus on the design, even though there is a lot of work being done outside Perlego.
We want to build a brand that resonates with students. Many platforms are selling textbooks, but most sell business-to-business (B2B) rather than directly to the consumer (B2C). That's exactly where we see a gap, and this is the area of business where we've excelled so far.
Q5: Where are your services available?
We are available worldwide. About 75% of the publishers that we have onboard give us the worldwide rights to distribute their titles. Therefore, we have a strong offering that we can provide in many countries. Our strongest growth areas right now are outside Europe, notably in Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand.
Q6. The monthly price of the subscription (£12) seems incredibly cheap, given readers have access to thousands of expensive textbooks. How do publishers commercially benefit from the partnership with you?
There are 550,000 books available on our platform with 3,000+ publishers, and I understand from the face value of the subscription price (£12) that it may not initially sound like a good deal for publishers. However, it is important to remember that we are not there to replace existing sales channels. We still believe that the print book is an excellent product. If students use a textbook regularly throughout their time at the university or perhaps have some form of personal attachment to it, they are still likely to buy a print version of the textbook, and we encourage that. Where we exist is for students who are told to read a certain amount of pages or a particular chapter, and without the model like Perlego, they are forced to decide whether to buy an expensive textbook to read a couple of chapters or to borrow it, buy it second-hand or access a pirated version online. That is where we create value for students without sabotaging publishers' existing sales channels.
Q7: How do you decide what books should be part of your portfolio? What's the process behind it?
We initially started as the textbook platform, but we’ve since expanded and want to create a central platform of educational content for adults. We offer a huge amount of ‘self-help' and non-fiction educational books on our website. Choices are based on the users' demands. We aim to have the highest coverage possible on university’reading lists because our core focus is university students. In principle, this guides us to what publishers we should work with.
Q8: What's the next stage of Perlego development?
We are still looking to internationalise. The big target is the United States. We have shown this model works in Europe, but the problems we are trying to fix for students and publishers are greater in the US. At the same time, we aim to continuously improve our users' study experience that involves things above and beyond just reading, for example, automatic referencing available on our platform or providing students with revision notes – something that we are currently working on. The third avenue of our development is to expand our platform across more European languages. At the moment, we predominantly have English titles alongside a growing number of Spanish, German, and Italian titles. We’re now looking at several other languages including French and Portuguese.
Q9: Can you remember your first day at Perlego? What was, amongst many, the biggest challenge that a company faced back then?
When I joined Perlego back in 2016, it was only four of us in a room at the WeWork office in Paddington in London with no real product developed - we are now a team of 75. We had grand plans, so I suppose the major challenge was actually to deliver a viable product. In these early days, we had to introduce the business model that would be disruptive with no history in the market or data to prove our hypothesis of how we could help students and publishers. We relied on passion and determination. We needed to get publishers on board and make them convinced of what we were trying to build. It is a lot easier now because we have many dedicated users and data to back up. Today, publishers realise that this model is beneficial to them, but convincing them in the early days was not easy. Our solution to the problem was to speak to everyone who publishes academic content and ask for their feedback. So I guess perseverance and persistence were key. In the beginning, we did not have the same level of understanding of the market as we have now. We did not realise how huge piracy was, and we had to learn this quickly. We knew that the best way to learn was to have as many conversations as possible with publishers. The voice of publishers was vital to us back then, and it still is now.
Q10: Do you think that Perlego can be as big as Netflix?
I would caveat my answer that we are not trying to be a new Spotify or Netflix, and some of the comparisons can be almost unhelpful. As I mentioned earlier, there are many dissimilarities between us and other subscription services, including the commercial model or long-term vision. That being said, in terms of the size, the market, and potential, I certainly think we can be as successful as other platforms. The student audience worldwide is enormous. and in making education more accessible, we’re solving a global problem. That is why more and more publishers want to work with us and that is why we are sure that even more growth will come.
Visit Perlego at https://www.perlego.com/