Books

Bowker has merged the U.S.-based PubTrack Consumer brand with U.K.-based Book Marketing Limited (BML) under a new global brand named Bowker® Market Research. Products and services coming together under Bowker Market Research are the newly merged U.S. and U.K. consumer research products, industry statistics, U.K.’s Book Marketing Society, and U.S. bibliographic statistics.
 
The day-to-day operations of the team will be headed up by Jo Henry as Director of Bowker Market Research.

This has been a tumultuous year for the book business, a time of profound change in the way books are distributed and read. It is no exaggeration to say that the widespread acceptance of digital devices and a simultaneous contraction of shelf-space in stores qualify as a historic shift. The demise of Borders, the country's second-largest book chain as recently as a year ago, was largely offset by the sale of millions of e-readers and electronic books on a vast scale…

RFID (radio frequency identification) technology was patented in 1973 and now is making its way into book publishing. Manufacturers and retailers, including The Gillette Co., Michelin and Wal-Mart, are embedding RFID tags in their packaging to automate checkout, track inventory and control theft. A book manufacturer has developed a process that embeds the chips in the chipboard of hardcover books during manufacturing. BindTech Inc. in Nashville, Tenn., conceived of the idea to embed the Smart Guard technology serendipitously, while manufacturing DVDs last spring. "We put an electromagnetic bar inside the [CD] case to prevent theft, but the bar interfered with the CD's graphics," says