Data

Although much of BookExpo America's discourse seemed colored by the ongoing Amazon-Hachette dispute, there were a number of events that exuded optimism and excitement for the future. Among these was the Startup Challenge, a competition that highlighted the innovation of 18 startups hoping to make their mark on the publishing industry.

Two industry innovators have announced platform-level integration engineered to enhance reader experience and shape the future of publishing.

Today at SXSWedu in Austin, McGraw-Hill Education introduced Connect Insight, a data analytics and visualization tool that provides at-a-glance views of student performance in real time via a tablet device.

Connect Insight automates the data analysis process so that instructors can pinpoint how each student is performing individually and relative to peers, as well as gauge the effectiveness of their assignments. It also acts as an early warning system to immediately identify and help struggling students.

Tuesday, March 4th, 2014, New York, NY: Leading ebook technology company Vook today launched Author Control, a daily market intelligence dashboard that allows authors to track the sales and unit downloads of their books in Amazon, Amazon KDP, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Nook Press, Kobo Writing Life, CreateSpace, Smashwords, Google, and Samsung, and display their results in a secure, easy-to-use online and mobile-accessible dashboard. Learn more about the new service at http://vook.com.

Stanford, California - Institutional usage reports for the publications hosted on the HighWire platform from 2014 onward include the latest COUNTER Code of Practice metrics.

Having worked at EMI records for over a decade, Chantal Restivo-Alessi knows what it's like to have the digitization of media cannibalize your industry. "I went through the digital revolution early on with music," the HarperCollins's Chief Digital Officer told Fast Company.

The music establishment made mistakes, she admits. "In the early days, it was a lot of resistance in participating in the new business models," she added.

In the following Q&A Arora discusses predictive semantics and shares a New Year's resolution publishers might want to consider for driving digital revenue in 2014.

We asked some of our favorite thinkers in the publishing world: "What trends will shape the industry in 2014?" Here's what they had to say.

"Research is about a long, hard slog of building an understanding about how all the different parts of a business or a market works. It's about being willing to look at numbers that scare the hell out of you."

The advent of digital media has presented educational publishers with opportunities not only for the delivery of effective teaching and learning solutions, but also with significant challenges that are well known by readers of this column. These challenges include the need to acquire new competencies within the organizations, the creation of new partnerships with service providers and the need to sort through a range of technical issues.