One thing we try to do at Digital Book World is to present our audiences with useful, relevant, and, when we can, original data. It is a familiar complaint in our industry that we drive blind. Part of that is due to the sheer diversity and granularity of the “book business”. And another part is […]
Do ebook consumers love bestsellers, or does it just look that way?
In theory, the more books are sold online the more sales should move to the long tail. Online bookstores have the advantage of “unlimited shelf space”. Nothing has to be left out of the assortment because of constraints on capital to stock inventory or room to hold it. Furthermore, as Konrath and Eisler pointed out […]
Metadata is the new most important thing to know about
Several very recent conversations have come together for me. 1. Joe Esposito, the new CEO of GiantChair, says metadata is the key to publishing in the future; he describes metadata as the modern equivalent of Allen Lane’s discovery that cheaper paperback books sold in mass merchant locations could boost book sales. Of course, Giant Chair […]
The Future of Books for Publishers and Booksellers
There is a big picture and a long arc within which our day-to-day activities are taking place. The 20th century consumer media were horizontal in their subject matter — that is, very broad — and format-specific. In the States, that means entities like CBS or NBC in television, The New York Times, or Random House. All of these companies provide content across the full range of human subject interests, but they pretty much stick to their formats: broadcast, newspapers, and books, respectively
Success in a Parallel Universe: Perhaps with Some Help from Your DAD
We’re going to discuss a subject this morning that was on hardly any radar screens a year ago; it would not have been a compelling subject for presentation at last year’s Making Information Pay. But today, Digital Asset Distribution is on a lot of minds. What happened?
After all, book content has been going out on the web for quite a while. My company did a digital marketing program for a book called “Longitude” in late 1995 which centered around offering a free chapter through relevant web sites. For several years, Amazon has had a program showing interior book pages, starting out as “Look Inside” and now “Search Inside the Book”. Lots of publishers participated, but didn’t instantly express a need to manage their own digital distribution