Data

The way that books are selected for publication has remained basically the same for years: editors read over a manuscript and decide if they think it has potential and is a good fit. But that could be changing: The publishing platform Inkitt has teamed up with Tor to release the first book picked by an…

"The hallways" is a term you may know well if you’ve spent much time at publishing conferences. It refers to the conversations that happen during coffee breaks, lunch hours, and before and after formal sessions: the networking. Rüdiger Wischenbart’s Publishers’ Forum here in Berlin is known for its good “hallways,” lots of break time to…

Altmetrics (a non-traditional assessment of citation-impact metrics in scholarly publishing) have passed their fifth birthday. While there are debates taking place about important issues (the potential gaming of altmetrics, how to weight the various events, etc.), they are helping to engage readers and drive article downloads. Who hasn’t found themselves clicking on a most shared/commented…

In his annual survey of ebook trends on the Smashwords platform, CEO Mark Coker noted that fiction, specifically romance, dominated 2015 sales, and that the sweet spot for ebook pricing shifted between $2.99 and $3.99. In a presentation prepared for the recent RT Booklovers Convention in Las Vegas, Coker surveyed a variety of trends extracted…

Books as a technology have been around for such a long time that it’s easy to forget that they were once major innovations themselves: Before the book there was the scroll, and the clay tablet before that, and it wasn’t until the end of the 16th century that modern indexes were invented, still largely the…

Last month I shared some thoughts about how indexes seems to be a thing of the past, at least when it comes to ebooks. I’ve given more consideration to the topic and would like to offer a possible vision for the future. Long ago I learned the value an exceptional indexer can bring to a…

In today’s market there are typically two methods for ebook distribution: free or paid. I’ve said before that one day we’ll see an ad-subsidized model take hold. Purists generally reject that concept, saying they won’t let advertisements interfere with their reading experience. That’s fine. They can pay full price but I’ll sometimes opt for the…

Over the last decade there has been a quiet revolution in the way academic institutions track and manage their research activity. “Universities have moved from having multiple systems for single purposes, to also having a single system for multiple purposes”, explains Bo Alroe, director, sales enablement for Elsevier’s Pure software. Now used by over 200…

While direct-to-consumer marketing promises larger audiences for authors and greater book sales, publishers must also learn new skillsets to make the most of these strategies, from data management to content marketing and mobile publishing. In an effort to help publishers transform their bookselling strategies, Book Business will be hosting Book Business Live: Bookselling Reinvented on…

Andrew Rhomberg wants to be the Billy Beane of the book world. Mr. Beane used analytics to transform baseball, famously recounted in “Moneyball,” a book by Michael Lewis. Now Mr. Rhomberg wants to use data about people’s reading habits to radically reshape how publishers acquire, edit and market books. “We still know almost nothing about…