What was the pervasive theme of IDPF DigiCon this year? Digital publishing, of course. Data, obviously. But also, libraries. Likely because DigiCon was hosted in Chicago this year, home of the American Library Association, library professionals had a seat on multiple panels throughout the conference and shared their perspectives on issues like book discovery, digital…
We take it for granted that when we open our favorite ebook app it automatically jumps right into the last book we were reading. And while that’s handy, I’d like to see at least one other option when I open the app. How about a reader-customized landing page? This page should be fully configurable, based…
Thanks to the rapid increase in computer processing speeds over the past decade, data has become easier to analyze and more available than ever before, and it’s changing the way we do business, said Sean Callahan, author of The Big Data-Driven Business and senior manager of content marketing at LinkedIn. Callahan led one of 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…
There are a number of key attributes successful publishers will be known for in the future. These core capabilities will be very different from the ones that have led to the modern empires of the Big Five. Some attributes will remain the same, of course. For example, it will always be crucial for publishers to…
Next week I’ll be attending IDPF DigiCon in Chicago on May 10th and 11th. Now boasting a new name and location, DigiCon looks to tackle many challenges within the book industry brought on by rapidly changing technology. Sessions ask forward-looking questions like: How can publishers reimagine the ebook as an open and cross-platform experience? How…
In the world of email marketing, experts constantly talk about the importance of adding new subscribers, increasing open rates, and boosting click rates. The internet is littered with articles on these topics. But, are these the best metrics to gauge success? If email marketing is supposed to help generate book sales, could we be majoring…
A core axiom of non-bookstore marketing, where you sell books directly to corporations or associations, is that you are not selling your book, but the use of your content to solve a prospective customer’s problem. Showing your potential buyers how to do that may take a little creativity. Brainstorming is key to finding new ways…
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…
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…
