Opportunity
The Audiobook Publishers Association estimated that in 2009, 49% of the $900 million U.S. wholesale audiobook market was digital downloads. Folium Partners is committed to helping you enter that market with a revolutionary multimedia product that begins with audio and ends with “Wow!” For just a fraction of the cost to deliver plain audiobooks, you can deliver a new type of product through the App Store℠ mobile channel.
Building software is expensive, and it’s unknown territory for most companies. Folium Partners makes its team of software professionals your go-to engineering crew for upgrading existing audio materials into interactive media experiences for modern mobile customers.
Our proven enhancedAudio™ framework powers a unique interactive media experience for more than a thousand different titles. We’re fast, too—most projects are in-and-out under 30 days, triple tested and guaranteed to work properly. Products featuring our technology are currently sold for use on the iPhone®, iPad®, and iPod Touch® through the Apple App Store℠, the world’s best mobile marketplace, serving more than 200 million customers and 7 billion app downloads in 2010 alone.
Typical mobile market audiobooks net publishers just 10%-20% of the selling price. At Folium Partners, we’ll become your favorite service provider, not a middleman. All fees are up-front and one-time, leaving to you the full net proceeds of every sale—and a drastically increased profit margin. There are no strings attached to the ownership of your app or content, either; you retain all rights to your provided content as well as the ownership of the completed app.
Transition
We recognize that moving to a distribution platform such as the App Store can be daunting, especially if your company has yet to make any forays into interactive software or digital marketplaces.
Folium Partners provides the tools to easily manage all of your publishing projects, and we can even manage the uploads and app approval process prior to sale. Or, if your team is comfortable with digital certificates and digital distribution, you are encouraged to set up your own iOS developer account. Of course, we can help facilitate that as well.
Our build fees for clients with existing audiobook portfolios and their own Apple iOS developer account start at just $99 per project.
It’s an App
Nobody wants an audiobook or video tutorial hidden inside a plain wrapper. Our frameworks are always growing new features and functions, providing your customers with experiences that match their mobile expectations. We support multiple languages, providing you the option of presenting your content and user interface in the language set for the device. Your products will all include native support for accessibility, with VoiceOver text-to-speech technology available for all user interface elements and your content.
Additional features include multi-speed playback selection, a smarter sleep timer, and support for multiple projects combined within one single app. Coming this spring, our framework will take advantage of hardware features such as the accelerometer and gyroscope, for “shake-n-pause” and playback control.
Support
Our assistance doesn’t end after your app goes on sale, either. Folium Partners provides a comprehensive set of solutions for tracking sales through the App Store and app usage through our Bubbles™ reporting service. Bubbles provides in-depth information on app usage patterns including which devices are most popular among users, the frequency of repeat customers, which apps can be linked to repeat purchases, and whether your app customers remain local or use the apps while traveling.
Combined with the ability to deliver non-intrusive in-app marketing, Bubbles is an incredibly powerful tool for planning the most effective marketing on limited devices.
Possibilities
When consumers think of audiobooks, they generally imagine narrations of popular fiction. The enhancedAudio framework, however, allows for supplementary content beyond plain audio. The ability to display images, text, and soon, video, means an unprecedented amount of content and interactivity in your apps. Author commentary, image galleries, word games, and much more are just a few of the possibilities. Our apps provide a stable foundation for the digital sales of print media previously unsuited to the format. Academic and trade journals could feature full text in addition to the audio, links to related articles, and more detailed bibliographies. Magazine issues could be reproduced with the full complement of images of their physical counterparts in addition to the hands-free convenience of the audio format. And the always-on connectivity of the mobile devices means that consumers can follow links from your app across the Web for an interactive experience that is impossible in traditional publications.
Success
Whether you’re a small press or a major publishing entity, Folium Partners has the tools, infrastructure, and experience to make your digital debut a resounding and profitable success.