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CPI Publishing Solutions transforms research within the book industry by creating UK’s only book judging panel

September 2006

CPI Publishing Solutions, part of CPI - the world’s leading manufacturer of monochrome and two colour books - is using Snap’s complete survey solution to revolutionise research within the book industry. They have chosen Snap to develop a quantitative research tool that can evaluate potential readers’ and buyers’ responses to book jacket designs and new editorial concepts and manuscripts. This unique service is now available to publishers in the UK and is set to lead and reform research conducted on books prior to publication.

CPI produces over 500 million books a year and works with over 2,000 publishers worldwide. These publishers cater for a wide range of audiences including fiction, non-fiction, medical, legal, academic and business-to-business. CPI Publishing Solutions, provides a range of services in support of publishers’ drive to increase efficiency and profitability. One of the services on offer is Rapport, which has been created to give companies a highly cost-effective opportunity to carry out quantitative research amongst a significant sample of potential book buyers. Rapport enables publishers to test jacket designs, back cover “blurbs” and book extracts amongst a pre-determined sample drawn from its panel of 10,000 book readers and buyers.

Richard Maskell, CPI Publishing Solutions’ Director, has spearheaded the Rapport project and tells us ‘We wanted to design good looking surveys in-house so required a software package that would help us do this. We also needed to recruit a panel of 10,000 book readers and didn’t have the resources to do this ourselves. Snap Surveys ticked all the boxes and is a cost-effective solution’.

After purchasing the software and sending a member of staff on training, they now have the skills and expertise to design the surveys in-house. SurveyShop, Snap’s outsourcing division then recruited respondents for the 10,000 strong panel and ensured each member was qualified to meet the outlined demographic and UK profile. SurveyShop provide support by hosting and distributing each survey to the panelists and collecting the set quota of responses. This data is then sent to CPI Publishing Solutions so that they conduct their analysis in Snap and produce reports.

The team at CPI Publishing Solutions is extremely pleased with the response from the publishers and panelists, which has been very positive. This cost-effective service is to be rolled out to all its customers so that everyone has an opportunity to conduct this revolutionary research.

To find out further information on the Rapport service please call Richard Maskell on 0207 251 3400. For Snap software and outsourcing enquiries please call one of the Snap team on 020 7747 8900.