Data
October 26, 2016 at 9:04 am
On November 3rd Book Business's sister publication Target Marketing will host a webinar on the power of design thinking to improve customer experiences. As book publishers become more consumer-focused, launching newsletters, consumer-facing websites, and ecommerce experiences, it's crucial that they inject design thinking into their marketing and sales efforts. The webinar "Design Thinking: A New…
October 21, 2016 at 10:24 am
As more industries move towards digital interaction with their customers, a fundamental question has arisen from the ubiquitous capturing of data by digital platforms: when do the costs of data capture for customer analytics outweigh the benefits? To the company, the benefits of capturing and using customer data are improved products, higher engagement and customer…
October 20, 2016 at 11:54 am
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been creeping into our lives, first taking on complex, but narrow, tasks like optical character recognition or games like chess and Jeopardy. In recent years, the science of AI has advanced to a point where computers are assuming more meaningful and significant roles, like personal assistants for your phone and self-driving cars. A similar game-changing claim was…
October 19, 2016 at 11:09 am
Publishing may well have been the first data-driven industry. After all, selling copies of your newspaper, magazine or book depends upon writing about things that people care about and are engaged in. Finding out what things people cared about used to depend upon annual reader surveys or responses mailed in on a postcard. In 2016,…
October 19, 2016 at 10:54 am
This post began being written a couple of weeks ago when I recalled some specific misplaced expectations I had for the self-publishing revolution and started to ponder why things happened the way they did in recent years. It turns out a big part of the answer I was looking for provides clarity that extends far…
October 17, 2016 at 9:03 am
How are you helping consumers find the perfect book for their needs or interests? If you’re like most publishers, you offer a search function on your site. Visitors simply type in a topic and relevant titles from your catalog are displayed. This is pretty similar to how search works on Amazon. In both cases, book…
October 14, 2016 at 1:23 pm
Next week, Nielsen Book is expected to make a presentation of a first-time US edition of its white paper, The Link Between Metadata and Sales, at EDItEUR’s International Supply Chain Seminar at Frankfurt Book Fair Hall 4.C, Room Concorde. The event is scheduled for 1 to 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday (October 18). EDItEUR coordinates development of international…
October 3, 2016 at 12:45 pm
Even though you probably never stray from the Kindle reader app I’d like to encourage you to expand your horizons. It’s a good idea to keep an eye on Apple’s iBooks and Google Play, for example, to explore other platforms and keep Amazon honest. After all, Amazon’s need to innovate diminishes if ebook platform competition…
September 27, 2016 at 1:48 pm
It is not so long ago that we routinely talked of Old vs. New Media. The “Old” was characterized by the investment in and creation of content, which in turn gave rise to a common set of properties — definitive and authoritative journalism and scientific reports, the fixed text, the pursuit of the finest authors…
September 27, 2016 at 11:24 am
Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve never warmed to the idea that disruption is a good thing in business. I’m not a fan of companies that set out to disrupt the industries in which they operate (take that, Jeff Bezos and Elizabeth Holmes) and I am particularly skeptical about those that set out to disrupt education,…
