The Book Industry Study Group

The Book Industry Study Group (BISG), a leading U.S.-based trade association representing the entire book supply chain, announced today the publication of a new Policy Statement endorsing EPUB 3 as the accepted and preferred standard for representing, packaging, and encoding structured and semantically enhanced Web content — including XHTML, CSS, SVG, images, and other resources — for distribution in a single-file format. BISG member companies, and other industry stakeholders, can visit http://www.bisg.org/what-we-do-4-155-pol-1201-endorsement-of-epub-3.php to download a copy.

It looks like all those avowed Kindle fanatics might be going through ink withdrawal -- or so says a new report funded by a few titans of old media. The report, published last week by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), found that fewer consumers are purchasing books exclusively in electronic formats, while the number of booklovers who have "no preference" for e-books over print books is increasing. The percentage of e-book consumers who purchased books "exclusively or mostly" in e-book formats has decreased from 70 percent in August 2011 to 60 percent in May 2012.

E-book consumers are becoming more diverse in their format preferences, says the Book Industry Study Group (BISG)'s closely-watched Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading report. The third installment in Volume Three of this Bowker-powered study shows that the percentage of e-book consumers who exclusively or mostly purchase book content in e-book format has decreased from nearly 70 percent in August 2011 to 60 percent in May 2012. Over the same period, the percentage of survey respondents who have no preference for either e-book or print formats, or who buy some genres in e-book format and others in print, rose from 25 percent to 34 percent. The study also tracks changes in device ownership, showing that Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet has overtaken Apple's iPad among e-book consumers for the first time. Ownership of the Kindle Fire has grown from seven percent of respondents in December 2011 to 20 percent just six months later. Apple's iPad has remained static at 17 percent over the same time period.

Much of the change we are living through in publishing is plain as day to see. The shift from print to digital, like the shift from stores to online purchasing, is evident to all of us, inside the industry and out.

But there’s another aspect of the change that is not nearly as visible and that’s around systems and workflows. Publishing, even in the pre-digital age, was a systems-driven business.

What do you call a study about metadata? Metametadata? Metadatadata? 

The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) calls it “Development, Use and Modification of Book Product Metadata,” its brand new publication prepared by Brian O’Leary of Magellan Media Consulting and done in conjunction with BookNet Canada.

The 37-page report assesses why this is so (essentially an ever complicated web of middlemen like distributors, aggregators and content converters, as well as vast differences in the practices of large, medium and small publishers) and provides 10 recommendations publishers, retailers and other players (like metadata management vendors and services) can improve their processes and “future proof” metadata in the supply chain.

Integrated Learning Systems are edging out both print and e-textbooks in popularity with students, says new research from the Book Industry Study Group (BISG)'s ongoing study of Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education. The second installment in Volume Two of the study, which is powered by Bowker Market Research, shows that nearly 48 percent of students feel Integrated Learning Systems help with their studying; compare that with 45 percent for the core physical textbook and just 37 percent for the e-textbook. Further, nearly half of student respondents feel that Integrated Learning Systems help them improve their grade, compared with 40 percent for print texts and 33 percent for e-texts.

Print Vs. E: 
No verdict yet: Of the 14 percent of Americans who read both print and ebooks, an April 2012 study by the Pew Research Center found that 36 percent prefer ebooks, while just 24 percent prefer print—leaving some 40 percent without a preference.

E-book consumers’ preference for tablets is accelerating rapidly as dedicated e-readers drop in popularity, according to the Book Industry Study Group (BISG)’s closely watched Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading survey. The second installment in Volume Three of the study shows that, over the course of just six months, consumers’ “first choice” preference for dedicated e-readers such as those from Amazon and Barnes & Noble declined from 72 percent to 58 percent.

A first ever survey of college faculty perceptions toward classroom materials found that professors continue to equate their own and their students’ successes in the classroom to the use of materials such as textbooks and most prefer print formats.

For the past eight years, BISG’s Making Information Pay — a concise, half-day conference — has provided useful direction to thousands of book publishing professionals looking to build more profitable businesses through data-first thinking. The quantity and variety of data available to companies for driving business decisions is exploding. To remain relevant, organizations need to develop strategies for gathering, analyzing, and acting on this flood of information about who, what, when, where, why, and how. But how do companies properly plug into, make sense of, and act on these vast, sometimes disparate, data sets?