App Development

There are tremendous opportunities for using data to bring greater efficiency and more effective discovery to the research process. Publishing platforms, discovery services, and academic libraries are all in a position to make innovative uses of data that are the by-product of everyday research practices of scholars and students. The benefits of personalizing discovery are already playing themselves out in the consumer space, from anticipatory discovery services like Google Now to integrations of shared and personal collections through browser plugins. As in the consumer space, the implications of changing discovery

Writing is an iterative process. This article, for example, was revised 16 times before publishing. Writers, however, tend not to show their creative process-the final product usually stands on its own, free from markups, strikethroughs or tracked changes. Gregory Mazurek, a computer programmer from New York, has used the tools from his day job to show that the process of writing, in his case a novel, can be just as important as the final product. Mazurek, whose pen name is Gregory Gershwin, is a software engineer at the online retail site Gilt. Like many programmers, Mazurek uses GitHub

While trade publishing is arguably still in the middle of its first digital disruption, the academic publishing landscape is in a much more mature stage of development. Indeed the biggest disruption to face academic publishing has been the rise of open access journals, which are now considered as part of the "new normal" of the sector. Last year we explored what the post-open access future for academic publishing might look like in two high profile panel

January is often a time of recaps and predictions, and the book industry is no exception to this trend. We've already shared in our December issue the big ideas we think will impact the publishing industry in 2015, so it seems only fitting that we take a look backwards as well. Book Business brings you the top 5 most popular articles of 2014.

Hachette Book Group CIO Ralph Munsen wants to move IT to the front of the office. Early this month, he plans to start embedding IT analysts throughout the firm in an effort he hopes will give the publisher more time to focus on the creative projects that make up its lifeblood.

IT "will actually sit with the people who use the tools and support them," Mr. Munsen said in an interview. Ten business analysts will be assigned to functions including finance, digital, sales and marketing, and production.

What will book publishing bring in 2015? Shrouded as the industry is behind a veil woven of billions and billions of dollars, it's difficult to say. But if you look hard enough - at the bestseller lists, the court cases, the controversies - you can glimpse through the metaphorical keyhole and into the back rooms where the deals are made. With this in mind, here is a somewhat reliable predictor for the publishing industry in 2015.

Let's begin with what we do know: 

Hacking, denial-of-service attacks, and other acts of cyberterror and cyberwar have been with us for years, but are becoming more common as more disenfranchised countries and factions come online and gain the skills to perpetrate hacking attacks. Retailers like Target, Home Depot, and TJ Maxx were famously hacked in order to gain credit card numbers, while banks and other financial institutions have been hacked for monetary gain.

But theft isn't the only motivation. Increasingly, politics is becoming a motivation, from Wikileaks to Edward Snowden.

It's a cheerful orange giant stuffed with fan fiction and smileys which can garner a billion reads for an erotic One Direction story - scoring 25-year-old Texan Anna Todd a six-figure publishing deal in the process. But Wattpad also has a serious side as a thriving culture of original writing, with a small but steady flow of authors finding mainstream success with Big Six publishers such as Random House and Harper Collins. Half a dozen of these authors are getting together in the real world mid-December, at Wattpad's first UK convention.

For the first time, mobile publishers can quickly assess the demographic profile of their users, compare it to those of their competitors' apps, and easily make accurate data-driven decisions about who to target in acquisition campaigns. Today, App Annie is releasing Audience Intelligence, a demographic profiling tool that can tell mobile developers the age, gender, income, education, and other standard demographic details about their users. But publishers can also use the tool to check the profile of other apps' users, compare the two pictures, and contrast both with the general app-installing population on either of the major mobile platforms.

There's a "Netflix" for just about everything these days: e-books, magazines, music and, of course, movies. Ah, but what about audiobooks? That's Skybrite in a nutshell; it's basically "Netflix for audiobooks," offering unlimited listening for a flat rate of $9.99 per month. The service was born to be mobile, with apps for Android and iOS. You can browse the selection by Staff Picks, Categories and Contributors, and for any given title it's a one-tap affair to start listening and/or add it to your Favorites.