Social Media

I decided to wait a few days before writing about Amazon's acquisition of Goodreads. I wanted to let the dust settle before weighing in with my own opinion. Now that I've had some time to mull it over, here's what I think: This has the potential to be a game-changer that could be the next, and possibly final, nail in the coffins of other ebook retailers...but only if Amazon actually does something with the Goodreads platform.

After two years of stops and starts, Bookish, the book discovery and e-commerce website co-owned by three of the world’s biggest publishers, finally opened for business in February. Seven weeks later, Amazon has acquired Goodreads, the leading book-centric social network.

Coincidence?

Of course, with 16 million members, San Francisco-based Goodreads is a logical enough acquisition target for the e-tailer. (The sale price hasn’t been disclosed but seems likely to have been in the low eight digits; according to Crunchbase, Goodreads had raised a total of $2.75 million in funding.)

I’ve been seeing lots of articles about social reading and how it’s the wave of the future for e-book discovery. CBC News had a lengthy article on the topic, and Digital Book World weighed in on it yesterday. (Incidentally, enough with the Fifty Shades references, OK guys?)

While social discovery makes for fascinating news articles, and sites like Goodreads are certainly in that space, I decided to go to the source—readers—and ask them for their opinion. You know what will make self-described introverts put down their books and speak up?

 Lori Hettler is a passionate reader, tearing through about 80 books a year. But as a resident of a Pennsylvania town and with a preference for fiction from small publishers, she can have trouble finding new books to feed her habit.

She tried to start a book club, but there weren’t enough takers. For years she made a weekly trip to browse a bookstore 40 minutes away in a Scranton suburb.

But then she found a solution to her problem: Goodreads.com, a social media site for finding and sharing titles that has 15 million members…

Yesterday, we filled you in on the fact that the Berlin-based digital reading platform known as Readmill was very close to releasing an e-reading app for the iPhone, and as it happens … the app was officially released today. (Quite a coincidence, no?)

According to the company, the newly-released app (appropriately enough, it’s called Readmill for iPhone) was designed to create what they’re referring to as “a seamless mobile reading experience for users.” Readmill, after all, is already available as an app for the iPad.

In October last year “social reading” iPad app Readmill announced support for Adobe DRM-protected ePub and PDF formats, and integrated into the Kobo book store, among others. Prior to these moves Readmill had been locked into a complex method of users needing to get books and documents into the ePub format for them to be able to use the app and make annotations, bookmarks and share content. It’s now taking its formerly iPad-only reading expirience to the iPhone, with the app going live in the iTunes store today.

We here at Publishing Business Today are fairly transfixed by today's confluence of the presidential inauguration and the observance of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. We get a little choked up about democracy and civil rights, so the whole thing has got us a little verklempt. In the spirit of the day, we direct you to the King Center's extensive bibliography on Dr. King, Civil Rights and Nonviolence.

Companies across the globe are full of executives who believe in the traditional model of digital marketing and may need a little convincing to recognize that times are changing. You may also find that these executives are a bit jittery because their once tried-and-true tactics are becoming less effective. The well of consumer patience for constant interruption is exhausted.

“I won’t be talking much about the future, and I won’t use the word ‘publishing’ very often.” A funny way to begin a talk called “A Futuristic View of the Publishing Industry,” but Publishing Technology COO Randy Petway’s take on the topic at yesterday’s Publishing Technology Executive Exchange at the wine cellar of Del Frisco’s on the Avenue of the Americas in New York City was apt indeed, focused as he was on the way consumers discover and purchase content. That bit of semantic gymnastics on Petway’s part had to do with what he described as the difference between trends and realities. Trends are things that people think are going to happen; the "future" of publishing, however, is already happening—a reality—he explained.

Measuring the efficacy of social media marketing still isn't an exact science, regardless of what the gurus and ninjas tell you.

So how can we whittle all the thousands of social campaigns we've seen this year down to a definitive list of the '10 best of 2012'?

Do we gauge it on the number of new fans acquired, retweets, ROI, YouTube views, the number of people it reached, sentiment analysis, the amount of traffic it drove or maybe the number of new brand advocates it created?