Today Penguin Random House announced a new partnership with Amtrak that will provide a selection of free ebook excerpts to passengers riding the Boston to Washington, D.C. Acela Express. The excerpts will be available to passengers through Amtrak's redesigned WiFi service, AmtrakConnect, and each excerpt will include buy buttons that allow readers to purchase the title from a number of retailers.
Charles Duhigg
Charles Duhigg, investigative reporter for the New York Times and author of the recent book “The Power of Habit,” joined us on September 13th as the closing keynote speaker for our Publishing Business Virtual Conference, to share his insights into how corporate habits are developed, identified and altered. How do you find your company’s keystone habit? Listen to Duhigg’s talk and find out!
What were you doing on Sept. 13? No matter. We here at the Publishing Business Group were putting on another installment of the Publishing Business Virtual Conference and Expo. Whether you were online with us or not, you can now, starting today, access all 12 book, magazine and technology sessions from the conference, plus two keynotes—from Globalvision’s Rory O'Connor and the New York Times’ Charles Duhigg—on demand. Any time you want.
If you've been living under a rock, you may be unaware that on Thursday, Sept. 13, your friends at Book Business, Publishing Executive and the Publishing Business Conference and Expo will be brining you the Publishing Business Virtual Conference.
Around the time I started working in trade publishing, Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" was a huge bestseller, clocking sales at record rates. I was impressed, and still am, but my thinking on what these numbers meant was altered by the comment of a colleague: "Just because people are buying the book, doesn't mean they're reading it."
And, of course, it's true. Hawking's book was a trendy intellectual purchase. Drop a copy of this much-talked-about dense and brainy bestseller on your coffee table, and guests were sure to gain a favorable impression of your erudition. But speak knowledgably about black holes, quarks and antimatter? Mere ownership of the tome did not such conversations guarantee.
At the BISG ninth annual Making Information Pay Conference, held at the McGraw Hill auditorium on May 3, seven expert presenters took the assembled 200 industry professionals through a fast-paced three-and-a-half-hour session slicing Big Data down to manageable bites.
Not for the faint of heart, the event was focused on the message that Angela Bole, BISG Deputy Executive Director opened with. Citing a McKinsey Institute study’s warning of a critical shortage of expert analytical information workers she said that “It’s our belief that, as an industry, we need to harness the awesomeness of ‘deep analytical expertise’ in order to create the kind of book industry that’s truly capable of the innovation necessary to stay relevant over the coming years.”
Big Data, she said, “refers to the act of ‘taming’ the volume, variety and velocity of massive datasets.” It is what takes us to a place where we’re now able to develop holistic approaches to full-scale strategies that are analytical in the deepest sense of the term.”
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