Podcast: Simon Collinson on Frontmatter

Simon Collinson is TextbookHub’s Publisher Relations Manager and recently he recorded a wide-ranging conversation with LeanPub’s podcast FrontMatter, hosted by LeanPub founder, Len Epp.

Listen to Simon Collinson on the Frontmatter podcast.

We invite you to check out this episode of the podcast to hear Simon talk about his background in the book industry, living and studying in London, and the role that location can play when it comes to success or prestige in the publishing world. He shares about working on data analytics at Kobo and the concept he learned about of data skepticism. There’s also discussion on disrupting the reliance on unpaid interns in publishing, his venture Tilted Axis Press, and his new role at TextbookHub.

Here’s what Simon shared about his current activities at TextbookHub: “My role is to go and get as much content as I can, and to work on those integrations with publishers. And so, I’ll be doing everything from the business relationships, contract negotiation – that level of things. All the way down to QA-ing the EPUB files that get delivered.”

He explains that his role at TextbookHub is to support two value propositions: First is the reading experience for teachers and students with annotations, hyperlinks and other markups.

The second is the benefit of bringing all the materials together. “The idea is that the student or the instructor logs into this one place. They have all of their books there. If the book’s hosted on an external service, we make it as easy as possible for them to go out and access that content.”

Simon notes that in this complex space, something all the players have to ask themselves is “Does your product integrate with such-and-such learning management system? Does it get information from student information systems? Do you have SSO??”

Tune in to hear all about TextbookHub, Simon, his indie press and its recent awards and accolades, as well as his answer to Len when he asked “Do you have any big predictions for 2021 in the book publishing world?”