Online Sales

An algorithm recently bought me a Father’s Day present I didn’t need or ask for, using my own money. You see, my wife was buying sheets from Amazon when they presented her with the book The Arm by Jeff Passan (HarperCollins) as a Father’s Day suggestion. $27.95 later my charge card was hit with the…

Now is better than later because later might never come. Among the many tragic losses related to the above wisdom, one of the most trivial revolves around the topic of shopping behavior. (Apologies to the Maharishi inside us all.) And this matters a great deal in the world of books, where we know from our…

The Digital Book World Conference & Expo (DBW) notably shifted its attitude towards major technology platforms this year. The platform giants Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google were ominously dubbed “The Four Horsemen.” They were referred to as such throughout the conference, and the language used to depict these companies matched the apocalyptic theme. Described as…

Day two of the Digital Book World Conference opened with a focus on data, particularly data that examines industry-wide bookselling trends. Unfortunately, it’s clear that much of this data is largely incomplete and the conclusions publishers can pull from it are shaky at best. Michael Cader, creator of Publishers Launch, led a session that explored…

One of the sessions I was most excited to attend at this year’s Digital Book World Conference & Expo was Rand Fishkin’s talk on search engine optimization (SEO) and book discovery. Fishkin is the CEO and founder of Moz, a leading SEO and content marketing software company. I anticipated this session would be filled with…

In the age of mobile, digital, social, and online shopping, brand and marketing messages are increasingly interpreted and catalogued by computers. As a result, metadata is taking on a new and important role for authors and publishers. It is becoming a crucial foundation for successful direct-to-consumer marketing and discoverability. We all know that content consumption…

In the past week, I’ve had conversations with leading executives at two of Amazon’s competitors in the ebook space. They had strikingly different takes on whether the agency pricing regime, which is now in place by contract with all five of the biggest trade publishers, helps keep competitive balance in the ebook marketplace or prevents…

The view of Amazon from the wider literary world has become increasingly poisonous, to the extent that people have responded with grave concern because the Evil Empire is now … opening bookstores! Is this what we’ve come to, that the opening of new bookstores is something to be feared? Yes – because apparently Amazon will…

On Tuesday, Barnes & Noble CEO Ron Boire announced at the eTail West conference that B&N will be launching a long-rumored prototype store this year. Though Boire did not reveal the exact launch date or location of this store, he did say that the goal of the store would be to bridge the digital and…

Bookseller Barnes & Noble Inc. plans to open a digitally influenced prototype bookstore later this year. CEO Ron Boire made the announcement today at the annual eTail West conference in Palm Springs, Calif. “One of the challenges of that store is going to be the digital experience,” he said. “I don’t think until you’re fully…