September 20, 1995, Rockport, MA--Time Warner Electronic Publishing (TWEP), and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. will be pointing to each other from their web pages this week, thanks to their employees' affinity for Rock music and Internet publishing. Announced today by Laura Fillmore, President of the Online BookStore (OBS), it was chance and serendipity that brought the two publishers together when an employee from John Wiley & Sons, Inc. entered an online contest sponsored by TWEP and OBS this past summer.
When OBS presented the idea of a daily online "Rock IQ Quiz" to highlight the new Time Warner Quick Reads series at the Online BookStore (OBS) this summer, Andrew Lerner, Director of TWEP, said, "Excellent, let's do it."
Excerpting from the highly successful paperback (Warner Books) and disk (TWEP) of the same title, "Test Your Rock IQ" by Ira Robbins, OBS posted a new trivia question each day all summer on topics from Elvis trivia to The Cars to The Boomtown Rats to Klaatu, with the promise that the winner would receive fame and fortune.
The winner, through sheer coincidence, is Debbie Davis, John Wiley & Sons's Manager of New Media Development, Professional & Trade Division. Now, thanks to her high Rock I.Q., John Wiley & Son's Web Home Page (http://www.wiley.com) will be linked to Time Warner's highly trafficked Pathfinder site (http://www.pathfinder.com/twep) from 22 September to 20 October 1995, as well as the Online BookStore site (http://www.obs-us.com). Davis will also receive a collection of Time Warner Quick Reads titles.
Both Wiley's Davis and Time Warner's Lerner are amused by the OBS contest's outcome, yet challenged by the results of the trivia quiz. "When I got this job twelve weeks ago, I was excited about being part of developing Wiley's online publishing strategy to provide vital information to people worldwide. I never thought I'd be delivering my company a hot link from another publisher," exclaimed Davis, daughter of an American Gramaphone Records executive, who sometimes called on Dad to help her answer the daily question she had bookmarked from OBS.
When asked about Pathfinder putting a link into a competing publisher's home page, Lerner commented, "With Internet publishing, you think differently about how books and products relate to each other. Coupling synergistic marketing strategies between traditional competitors and interlinking publishers is quite a bit ahead of the curve. TWEP is excited to be part of the new world of online intermarketers."
Founded in 1807, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., is an independent, global publisher of print and electronic products, specializing in professional and consumer books and subscription services, scientific and technical books and journals, and textbooks and educational materials for colleges and universities. The company has publishing, marketing, and distribution centers in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Time Warner Electronic Publishing is the multimedia arm of Time Warner Trade Publishing, comprised of Warner Books, Inc. and Little, Brown and Company, with interests in online commercial services, the Internet (Pathfinder), original CD-ROM development, a books-on-floppy-disk publishing program called Time Warner Quick Reads and the creation of the online mystery game, Modus Operandi.
Rock-and-Roll lives on, making strange web-fellows among the giants of the New York publishing scene.
Find us at:
Time Warner's Pathfinder Page:http://www.pathfinder.com/twep
John Wiley & Son's Home Page:http://www.wiley.com
Online BookStore's Home Page:http://www.obs-us.com/obs/english