BNC Blog

The pages turn just like…an ebook

July 29th, 2010 by Chelsea Theriault

The first time I saw a digital page-turn simulation, I thought, “That’s neat.” The first time I actually tried reading an ebook that way, I thought, “That’s annoying.” While an e-ink device’s screen refreshes to get to the next page, many desktop platforms, apps, and LED devices come with multiple options for getting from page A to page B. For example, my Kobo iPhone app has five: scroll, fade, slide, curl, and flip. Fade is the winner; it’s a gentle but speedy refresh. Scroll always seems to make me skim over parts (probably the phone’s uber-responsive touch screen combined with a habit born from extended Internet surfing), and the remaining options that mimic page turns feel clunky to me. They’re actually quite fast and elegant, but something about those movements doesn’t feel right as I’m reading.

Whether or not to imitate a paper reading experience on a digital platform is a topic that seems to polarize people. It can be a useful gimmick to help those new to e-reading bridge the gap between print and digital, but will we look back on the faux-bookshelf browsers and fluttering digital pages in five years and laugh?

Here’s an extreme case of “my-ebook-should-act-exactly-like-a-paper-book” silliness (from Ars Technica):

Three iPad users claim that because the iPad will shut itself off after remaining in direct sunlight for long enough, it fails to meet the promises Apple made about using the iPad as an e-book reader. The group has filed a federal class-action lawsuit in the Northern California district to “redress and end this pattern of unlawful conduct.” [...] The plaintiffs seem to take particular issue with Apple claiming that “reading on the iPad is just like reading a book.”

I find this so baffling that I don’t really know how to respond. But Chris Walters from The Consumerist deserves a big high-five for this retort:

If the plaintiffs win, I think Apple should also be forced to install a wind sensor so that pages flip automatically when you’re outdoors in a strong breeze. Then the company could sell an “iPadWeight” wireless accessory ($69) that you would have to put on top of the screen to “hold down” the pages. A wireless “iMark” ($29) that would function as a bookmark wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.

I’m looking forward to how e-reading interfaces develop, but hopefully they get over the growing pains and creepy nostalgia for how “real books” work (anyone playing the ebook drinking game, that one’s for you). The benefits of ebooks: they’re portable, immediate, searchable (should be, anyway), and relatively inexpensive. It doesn’t really make sense to display them on an imitation shelf, especially when the UI possibilities are so much greater.

Why not experiment with cover flow, colour coordination, a tag cloud-esque jumble that groups related authors together, dimming titles you’ve read recently, and lighting up ones you’ve marked as “to read”? The possibilities are endless. Bottom line: ereading software shouldn’t limit reading and browsing by pretending ebooks are made out of paper. Give us the option to explore text and ebook catalogues in ways that take advantage of the device, or platform, at hand.

“Class action lawsuit filed over ‘overheating’ iPads” on Ars Technica

The Consumerist’s response

Bookavore’s ebook article drinking game

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Tags: ebook
Posted in E-Readers, Future of the Book, eBooks | No Comments »

The Fight Over Formats: All or Nothing

July 28th, 2010 by Samantha Francis

Random House and the Jackal are going at it and I can’t blame them. They are fighting over some very valuable territory. We’ve all read lots about trying to claim backlist ebook rights, about the conflict of interest in becoming an agent-publisher, about single-channel exclusives being a bad idea, blah, blah, blah. Yes, neither side is squeaky clean and maybe neither was acting like the sharpest knife in the drawer at different points in time, but this turf war has raised a bigger problem:

Does it make sense to separate ebook rights from print rights?

It doesn’t—at least not if you’re the one who only has print. Here’s why:

Michael Shatzkin wrote a very long and very intelligent blog post about the abovementioned skirmish on Sunday. In it, he nodded to Evan Schnittman for pointing out that “Ebooks don’t exist in a vacuum” and “can’t be evaluated with stand-alone economics” and then quoted John Schline of Penguin who says “you don’t do a P&L on a format; you do a P&L on a title.”

The ebook-in-a-vaccuum assumption, which is so popular these days, is dead wrong. As Andrew Franklin says, “e-books are not a separate market from physical books. … Some would say they are parasitical on them. The editorial work, design, marketing and selling are all done for physical books, and e-books sell on their back.” This is probably the best way to frame the House versus Jackal dustup (running out of adjectives for fight here…).

By only grabbing ebooks rights, an ebook publisher is profiting from someone else’s investment—and this is true for frontlist and backlist titles. (Just because something has earned out does not mean the current profit isn’t deserved. The profit on backlist titles that have earned out is a result of the initial investment. In other words, if a title is successful it is at least partially due to having been published at all.) Print publishers invest a lot in creating the book’s files from which print or electronic book versions are made. Print publishers also spend considerable resources marketing and publicizing the book. Let’s not forget that this investment is also a risk; it’s a show of faith in the book and the author.

Until ebook-only publishers start sharing those substantial publishing costs, you could, technically, call them parasitic. They benefit from the quality of the edit, proofread, design, etc., and then profit from the advertising, marketing campaigns, media coverage, and resulting popularity—all paid for by the print publisher.

What does this imply about authors who want to work with a print publisher and self-publish the ebook format themselves? It does seem hard to have it both ways and claim the moral high ground. If an author sees a benefit to having a publisher they should recognize the publisher’s contribution to the entire life of a title, not ignoring its impact on one format. (To be clear, I’m not claiming the author doesn’t invest a lot in the book as well, but the proper time to address this is during advance and royalty negotiations, and yes this includes generous backlist ebook royalties.)

So to refute all the wild accusations that publishing companies are being evil, I point out that publishers have very legitimate reasons for insisting on buying all the rights to a book. They also have a legitimate complaint if a new format of a title they have worked on gets taken away. Calling them greedy is unfair (depending on the ebook royalty they offer, of course). As ebooks become increasingly popular, it is just bad business for a publishing company to invest the same amount it used to spend on publishing all formats into a smaller piece of the pie. In other words, would you want to be the sole investor in a project you don’t completely own, especially when your investment will result in beefing up someone else’s profit margin? No, you wouldn’t. It’s all or nothing.

Michael Shatzkin’s piece on the debacle.

Evan Schnittman’s related post on ebook royalties.

Andrew Franklin’s editorial on the kerfuffle.

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Tags: Andrew Wylie, ebook, publishing, self-publishing
Posted in eBooks | No Comments »

Web-First Workflow: Confluence Proof-of-Concept

July 26th, 2010 by Meghan MacDonald

Or, practicing what we preach.

Back in May, Noah blogged about the potential for Confluence by Atlassian to work as a web-first xml workflow solution. His post put Confluence up alongside WordPress from SFU’s Book of MPub (full disclosure: I worked with John Maxwell in 2009 on Start With the Web and still do some related work today) as a contender. Really, any CMS/wiki can work, it’s just a matter of how well it works and whether it works for you.

So, why Confluence?

We already use it and we like it. We have spaces for all of our projects and either upload attachments or create pages (the goal is to get away from uploading attachments whenever possible). At this point, we don’t want to start from scratch.

My Mission

To figure out if Confluence will serve BNC’s web-first production needs (tech documentation, educational materials, etc.), which include:

ease of use
WYSIWYG editor
version control
commenting
PDF export (we don’t have a designer on staff, so we need an easy export that anyone in the office can use)
customizable stylesheets

That’s it for now, but I will be testing the XML and HTML exports in the future.

Ease of Use

We already use it and like it, so that gets a check. Any problems we have with Confluence are based on our own organization of the content and not on Confluence itself. Bonus points for how easy it is to move child pages around to re-organize content.

WYSIWYG Editor

Check.

And Wiki mark-up.

Version Control

Check. At this point it’s at the page level, but we think it can be more granular — I just haven’t had time to figure out how.

Commenting

Check

PDF Export

So easy. Select pages you want to export from the tree structure, click export, and you have yourself a PDF.

Things I’d like to see: Currently, you can only export from one space at a time. We have all of our content divided into spaces by project, but sometimes we’ll need to pull in a page from a different space…but can’t unless we duplicate the content or temporarily move it over. So, I’d like to be able to select from multiple spaces when exporting.

Customizable Stylesheets

Huge win. You can choose to use the generic stylesheet but customize a header, footer, and title page, or you can dive in and edit the CSS yourself like this:

Things I’d like to see: Multiple stylesheets that apply to all spaces. Currently, it’s one stylesheet per space, but I’d like to be able to select from options when I export.

The Result

Increase Sales & Lower Costs with Better Metadata [pdf] was completely written in Confluence and exported as a PDF with a custom stylesheet applied. The title page was created separately, but everything else comes from Confluence. We needed something quick and easy so that anyone in the office can create and export tech documentation, or one-offs when we get requests for information from publishers — and Confluence works for us.

Up Next

Testing XML and HTML exports.

Links

Confluence by Atlassian

Noah’s Confluence as a Web Based Publishing System

The Book of MPub

XML Production: Start With the Web

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Posted in Business Models, Case Studies | No Comments »

SalesData Tip #11: From Tips to How-To’s—A Cornucopia of Help Options

July 22nd, 2010 by jfry

As we approach the fall, the industry’s busiest season, we thought it worthwhile to revisit the help options available on BNC SalesData. There’s nothing worse than being in a hurry and not knowing where to go for help. We, at BookNet Canada, are looking out for you and have provided you many, many ways to satisfy your hunger for help.

Sometimes while on the BNC SalesData site, you can’t remember that next step in the search you’re building or you’re unsure the site is even capable of doing what you want or need it to do to get ready. And you’re hurried; you have to rush for that sales meeting or to complete that report on deadline. In other words, if you are hungry for more knowledge but aren’t sure where to turn, there are a few avenues you can walk down to find the help that you need.

1. Tool Tips—Amuse-bouche

You may have noticed the little ? icon (image). It can be found on the home page, on the forms you use to build your search query, and on the results pages where you view your data. These “Tool Tips,” as we like to call them, are there to provide immediate help, on the spot, when you need it. They provide a little more information about how to use the box on the form or how to work with the tabular results on the screen without having to open up the whole Help Manual. They are meant to be there for when you need a little assistance. We’ll call them the amuse-bouche of the SalesData world. A helpful snack just when your resolve starts to flag.

Here is an example of a tool tip for the Simple Search box that is available on most pages on the site.

Simply click the ? to open the tip

tooltip icon

Then click the ? icon again to close it.

tooltip icon

2. Help Manual—Ordering From the Menu

If you are hungry for more, the Help Manual is the entire menu. Available on every page through the top navigation, this user manual is there to answer just about every question you may have about the site.

To view the manual click the link, and it will display either on the screen or in a new window depending on the browser you are using.

Help link in the top navigation bar

Whether it is about functionality, like what reports are available and how to create them, or what data is found in a results table and what it means, the Help Manual is there to feed you the full meal.

It starts off with some appetizers such as the Retail Contributors list and the Binding Code list.

First view of the manual

Then we move onto the entrées. Each part of the application is described and broken down by report type and other site functions, such as Saving and Emailing reports and viewing Early Preview Data. Each section has tutorials that break the site down by section into a 5-15 minute videos. All you need are headphones and a few minutes to find out what each section can do and how to use it.

First view of the manual

3. Contact Us—Dessert

The Contact Us is the after dinner dessert and/or digestif that offers a little more personal service than the Tool Tips or the Manual can. If you click Contact Us in the top menu available on all pages, you will see a form on screen into which you can enter the details of your inquiry and submit. This form and its details goes directly to a team of people, one of whom will reply to you quickly.

4. Training and Other Assistance—The Buffet Dinner

For those with an insatiable appetite for BNC SalesData detail, we offer a few training options where you can get all you can eat:

A) Webinars/In-House Training: A few times a year we offer webinars to subscribers via the web and voice-over IP (VOIP). The next one of these is offered on August 10 at 2pm. If you are interested in attending, please go to the Event Brite link listed in this week’s eNews. These are quick and convenient. We also will come to you in person or via the Web on a firm-by-firm request basis. To make such a request, please get in touch with us at salesdata@booknetcanada.ca.

B) Live Chat:You may have noticed that there is a little red link in the top navigation bar. This is where you can click to chat with us in real time about what you want to do in the site. We have operators standing by most days from 9-5. If not, then the link will read as Offline. One of the other help options may have to serve in the meantime until we are back up in person.

C) Call Us: If you are working on the site and you have no idea how to get the information that you need for your report/sales meeting/etc, please don’t hesitate to call us. We will be happy to walk you through your process and try to help if what you want or need is not obviously available through the simple reporting tools in the site.

D) Custom Reporting: When all those tools do not fit the bill, we do entertain formal requests for custom reporting. These requests do have a fee attached to them and can be discussed on a case-by-case basis depending on the scope and size of the request.

What’s next for Help? We are planning a few improvements to the existing Help that we provide on the site. It is too early to talk specifics but I am happy to say more help is on the way. Watch this space and other BookNet Canada communication channels for news when these will be available to you on the site.

As Sid the Sloth says, Mangia, Mangia!

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Posted in SalesData Tips | No Comments »

BNC 101: BISAC Classification

July 21st, 2010 by Meghan MacDonald

What are BISAC codes? How should you use them? Where are they used?

Book Industry Standards and Communications (BISAC) Classification Schemes are used to communicate subject information about a book. This information gets communicated through your ONIX file and is used to help identify where the book should be shelved in a physical store and how it can be found via search or browse in an online store, catalogue or other discovery platform.

BISAC Classification Schemes come in three forms: BISAC Subject Headings, BISAC Merchandising Themes, and BISAC Regional Themes. This post will focus on Subject Headings and Regional Themes.

BISAC Subject Headings

BISAC Subject Headings are the North American standard for describing subject information for your books. Each heading is actually made up of a code and a heading. The code is what is included in the ONIX file and is computer-readable, while the heading is the human-readable version of that code.

Each code is 9-characters long and is made up of 3 letters followed by 6 numbers.

Each heading is broken up into a minimum of 2 and maximum of 4 levels, getting more and more specific as you add levels.

Tip

Always make your codes as specific as possible. Using a general code means that your book will only be found when a reader browses in that general category. Specific codes, on the other hand, will be found in both the specific and general browse results—making it easier for readers to find your books.

Example

FIC000000 FICTION / General
FIC009020 FICTION / Fantasy / Epic

If you have a book that is an epic fantasy fiction, it should be classified as FIC009020 FICTION / Fantasy / Epic. (Side note: this is my favourite BISAC Subject Heading. I like to think it’s telling me the book is epic, instead of being an epic, like “Oh, dude, that fantasy fiction book is epic!”). If it’s only classified as general fiction (FIC000000 FICTION / General), readers who are looking specifically for epic fantasy fiction won’t find it in their browse results. The book will only appear if a reader is looking at browse results for fiction in general. So basically, if your reader knows what they want and you haven’t specified that your book is it, they won’t find it. If a reader were looking for an epic fantasy, why would she search general fiction?

BISAC Regional Themes

BISAC Regional Themes can be used when the subject of a book is tied to a specific region. That way, someone who is looking for all books about Vancouver Island can find all books about Vancouver Island.

These themes are numeric and are broken up into 7 levels:

Level 1 - Continents
Level 2 - Subcontinents
Level 3 - Countries
Level 4 - Subcountry regions
Level 5 - States, Provinces, Counties
Level 6 - City, Town, Area
Level 7 - Borough, Neighborhood, District

Example

4.0.2.0.2.2.0 is Vancouver Island, where:

Level 1 - Continents = North America (4)
Level 2 - Subcontinents = 0
Level 3 - Countries = Canada (2)
Level 4 - Subcountry regions = 0
Level 5 - States, Provinces, Counties = British Columbia (2)
Level 6 - City, Town, Area = Vancouver Island(2)
Level 7 - Borough, Neighborhood, District = 0

Once again, this information is becoming increasingly important as we discover books digitally—don’t get left behind!

Links

BISG Classification Schemes

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Tags: BISAC, discoverability
Posted in BNC 101, Biblio, Bookselling, Data Exchange Tips, Education, Metadata, ONIX | 1 Comment »

Slush Pile Onslaught Gives Publishers a Branding Opportunity

July 20th, 2010 by Samantha Francis

There is a lot to be afraid of when one considers the online book marketplace. When I read Laura Miller’s apocalyptic piece on the inundation of self-published slush pile submissions a couple of weeks back it made me incredibly depressed. The thought of the marketplace being full of subpar, unedited manuscripts turned into ebooks or printed on demand, thus making it impossible for readers to differentiate the good book from the bad, was a devastating one. Why? Well, we call it the slush pile for a reason. Although there are a handful of stories about the hidden gem buried in the slush pile, the slush pile is, for the most part, full of awfulness. (Full disclosure: I am very familiar with the slush pile. We have met on several occasions. I have spent many hours, days, months, with the slush pile.) And Laura is right: it will suck the will to live right out of you.

And now, gradually, the stuff that sucks the life out of me is available for purchase. To be fair, it is usually available for very cheap. But I got paid to read the pile and will never pay it so that I can read it.

So when anyone can “publish,” doesn’t the marketplace become the slush pile?
How will a reader differentiate a good book from a bad one?

This is a legitimate concern, but I also believe it is the opportunity that many publishing houses, big and small, have been waiting for: a real chance to brand themselves to a receptive audience. Suddenly readers will look for a stamp of approval on books and that stamp can take the shape of having a publishing company attached to the title.

I think it’s fair to say that few readers make buying decisions based on imprint or publisher now, and few can probably name the publisher of a book they’ve just read, despite many publishers doing their best to brand themselves. But this could change when readers look for ways to narrow down their book search and filter out as many stinkers as possible. Perhaps this is a chance to breathe new life into imprints and turn them into key identifiers of good books.

Imprints currently have cachet within the industry, but few book buyers bother to read the label, so to speak. Some genres readers already have publishers whose colophons are trusted advisors. (Are these perhaps the same genres that were early adopters of self-publishing?) But this trend stands to spread when it becomes more and more difficult to single out good books.

Laura’s Miller piece in Salon on slush piles and their horribleness.

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Tags: branding, online publishing, publishing, self-publishing, slush pile
Posted in Online Marketing | 2 Comments »

Ontario publishers collaborate for ebook promotion

July 14th, 2010 by Chelsea Theriault

No surprise here: publishers of all shapes and sizes are making ebooks. Still, making ebooks is one thing; selling them is another. While direct ebook sales may seem like a dream come true for any publisher with their eye on the margins (no discounts, distribution, or inventory), the reality is that partnerships are MUCH more beneficial than going it alone, especially on the expansive interweb. How would anyone know where to buy books online if stand-alone retailers didn’t exist and publishers only sold books from proprietary websites? How can companies with small marketing budgets afford to get the word out about their growing ebook catalogues? Exposure and discoverability is key. By partnering up, companies can pool their resources for the greater good of the collective, get noticed, and hopefully see some returns on their technology investments.

This is exactly what a group of academic, niche, general trade and children’s publishers within the Organization of Book Publishers of Ontario (OBPO) is doing to ensure that Canadian booksellers, libraries and readers discover their vast selection of e-books. The press release states:

With the support of the Ontario Media Development Corporation, the OBPO is launching a marketing campaign this summer with a series of national ads highlighting the strength, breadth and quantity of their e-book titles, which will soon number close to 5,000. The marketing campaign will target libraries primarily, with the goal of encouraging academic and public libraries across the country to expand their collections of Canadian-published e-books.

Right on, OBPO! It’s good to see resources pooled in a way that will bring attention to Canadian digital publishing. Small companies can’t always afford to divert marketing budgets away from p-books to ebooks, so collaborative, organizational campaigns are a good alternative.

If only someone could convince the Old Spice Guy to promote Canadian ebooks too…

LINKS

The OBPO’s press release, posted in full on Teleread

Old Spice Guy’s defense of libraries on Youtube

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Tags: discoverability, ebook, publishing
Posted in Online Marketing, eBooks | No Comments »

Printed Catalogues Makin’ my Life Difficult

July 13th, 2010 by Samantha Francis

PubFight, publishing’s favourite pastime, is not all fun and games. It takes a hard-working Marketing Manager to pull together the master list for the Fakefurt Book Fair. I know, that sounds easy—but it’s not! It’s a pain in the butt, and I blame the printed catalogue.

I have to go through countless printed catalogues splayed out all over my desk and then all over the boardroom table. Then the whole staff gets together and goes through them again, making sure we haven’t missed anything. We tear out sheets and I have manually enter them (uh…) into an Excel file and double check that I haven’t missed anything. After squinting over fine print and dealing with everyone’s different interpretation of proper catalogue layout, I’ve made a list of about 130 books.

But then I’ve got to double check the information because the catalogues are at least a month old. Pub dates have changed, prices have changed, new information has surfaced. I’ve got to go through each record (uh…) and hope I’m getting the most up-to-date information elsewhere.

But despite my efforts, I have missed something: A book is cancelled. I just heard about it, someone mentioned it in an email about something else. A hot new book has just been dropped in. I heard about it from a coworker who was reading mediabistro.

If only there was a way that catalogues didn’t clutter my desk and other office surfaces, and at the expense of trees.
If only I didn’t have to retype everything.
If only catalogues were updated everyday and I could get notified when a title is cancelled, delayed or dropped in.
If only someone would create an online catalogue system that was easy to navigate and could be searched—

Oh, wait! We are. It’s called BNC CataList and it’s going to make next year’s PubFight and many of your lives a heck of a lot easier.

Stay tuned for more about this wonderful invention and the impending improvement of your daily lives.

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Tags: CataList, ecatalogue, online catalogue, PubFight
Posted in Book Market, CataList, Online Marketing, PubFight | No Comments »

Give the Backlist a Chance

July 12th, 2010 by Samantha Francis

Yesterday marked the 50^th anniversary of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. This has me thinking about backlist. We spend a lot of time talking about the future and worrying about the frontlist, but what can set a publisher apart from the rest is a profitable backlist and arguably what can set a bookseller apart from the rest is thoughtful curating of backlist titles.

As much of our business goes electronic and online, publishers need to pay attention to their backlists. Backlist titles have a better chance of selling when they become infinitely more discoverable by being searchable and available online. While we are fussing over the frontlist, it would be wise to invest a bit of time into making backlist titles easier to find.

Embedded author videos and other fanfare are not necessary. But a complete ONIX file is. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve come across an older title online that doesn’t have more than a title, author, cover, price and publisher attached to it. Publishers can’t rely on the back cover to sell backlist because we often don’t stumble upon backlist titles on a shelf.

A book description and author bio are crucial in generating interest. Publishers don’t acquire a book without these so why would we expect readers to be any different? Awards and reviews are also powerful tools when swaying a skeptical buyer to purchase a book. BISAC codes would also help. How else am I to know the difference between an out-of-date science book and a classic sci-fi novel? (Google it? Nah, most of us won’t bother.)

So grab your customer’s attention right away and seal the deal. If you think it’s worth having a backlist title in print, give it chance at survival by filling out a killer ONIX file for it, because not every backlist title is as easy to sell as To Kill a Mockingbird.

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Tags: backlist, BookNet Canada, Bookselling, discoverability, ONIX, publishing, To Kill a Mockingbird
Posted in BiblioShare, General BookNet, Metadata, ONIX, Online Marketing | No Comments »

Increase Sales and Lower Costs With Better Metadata

July 8th, 2010 by Meghan MacDonald

BookNet Canada teamed up with the Canadian Bookshelf to bring you Increase Sales and Lower Costs With Better Metadata: A Step-By-Step Guide for Publishers [pdf].

More and more digital platforms are sourcing their content from ONIX files, which makes it easy for publishers to take part without increasing their workload. The catch, though, is that the information needs to be in the ONIX files to be shared, and currently most publishers are not including enough information in the files they’re creating.

The types of gaps we’re seeing are often related to marketing information: is the contributor Canadian? Has the title won any awards? Is the subject matter related to a specific region? Did you include a description and an author bio? What about reviews, endorsements, tour information… ?

The point is that this is all information you already have, and it should be added to your ONIX file by everyone who touches the book throughout the life cycle. If you include this information in your ONIX feed then it will be visible (and, more importantly, discoverable ) in places such as a publisher’s website, online bookstores, library catalogues and systems, electronic catalogues like BNC CataList , and search and discovery platforms like the Canadian Bookshelf , a project of the Association of Canadian Publishers in collaboration with the Canadian Publishers Council.

To help you get started, we joined forces with the Canadian Bookshelf team to create this guide that we hope will help you do more with the information you already have. Take a look and let us know what you think — it’s a living document, so it can be updated and re-exported on the fly to ensure you’re always getting accurate, up-to-date information (but more on that, later!).

Links

Increase Sales and Lower Costs With Better Metadata: A Step-By-Step Guide for Publishers [pdf]
This guide can also be found in the Biblio Tools: The Snapshot module in our Bibliographic Standards and Certification sections of the BNC website

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Tags: BookNet, BookNet Canada, CataList, discoverability, Metadata, ONIX, online catalogue, publishing
Posted in Biblio, Bookselling, Data Exchange Tips, Metadata, ONIX, Online Marketing | No Comments »

New research study: Do you know what to expect when a movie adaptation comes along?

July 8th, 2010 by Samantha Francis

BNC has just released its latest research study. It’s about movie adaptations and tie-ins. I don’t want to give too much away because we made it especially for SalesData subscribers. You have to log in to get the details.

We looked at how movie adaptations affect the sales of the books on which they are based and on backlists. It seems like an easy question to answer, but this report gives you information you can actually use when the next movie adaptation comes along.

We compared book sales to box-office sales and took into account marketing tools, like trailers and movie tie-in covers, to determine when audience interest in a title begins and when it fades away. Titles from the author’s backlist are also included to see if effects extend to their other books.

So we’ve done our homework. And the results are not as predictable you would think; some of the findings go against our everyday assumptions.

How long a sales spike you should expect?
What sales increases should you predict when deciding on a reprint order?
How many copies should you stock of a movie tie-in and for how long?
Are movie tie-in covers always the way to go?

Find out by logging in to BNC SalesData and following the instructions.

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Tags: BookNet, BookNet Canada, books, movie adaptation, movie tie-in, publishing, publishing trend, repackaging, research study
Posted in Book Data and Analysis, Case Studies, General BookNet | No Comments »

Midlist: I will survive!

July 5th, 2010 by Samantha Francis

Chelsea wrote about James McGrath Morris’s piece in HuffPo last Tuesday and made some really enlightening observations (”Every title is ‘face-out’ online’—Chelsea, you’re blowing my mind!).

It’s true that metadata, a.k.a. the ONIX files that publishers craft so carefully and thoroughly, can actually make midlist authors more visible online. This not only impacts ebooks, but regular books too. If I can find a book’s info online, I can order it online or go down the street and buy it at my local bookstore. Not only that, but if I wander into a bookstore and think of a very specific subject I’d like to read about (for example, cheese difficulties), the bookseller can look it up and find it for me, no matter how obscure (order Cheese Problems Solved edited by P.L.H. McSweeney).

But I think there’s more to contend with in Morris’s piece. His assumption is that midlist authors will become extinct. I think that’s a little melodramatic, especially given his definition of the midlist author as someone who earns out a modest advance. Modest advances will still be given and still be earned out by some. It is probably more accurate to say that the midlist might change, that some authors will no longer qualify while others will join the club. And that’s nothing new.

Going online does not mean that the book-buying public will only have eyes for bestsellers. In fact, it is the backlist that stands to benefit the most from online discoverability. Our market will not narrow, but it may break up into specialized sections. Our tastes will not suddenly homogenize, instead we will be empowered to find and buy what we truly want.

How carefully do you tag your book’s ONIX files? Are you sure I can find it? Better be, if you want it to be part of the midlist.

LINKS:

Chelsea’s BNC blog post

James McGrath Morris’s piece in HuffPo

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Tags: advances, author, BookNet Canada, bookseller, discoverability, e-book, ebook, Metadata, Midlist, ONIX, online, publishing
Posted in BiblioShare, General BookNet, Metadata, ONIX, Online Marketing, eBooks | No Comments »

Midlist authors might actually be more visible online: A rebuttal to HuffPo

June 29th, 2010 by Chelsea Theriault

A few weeks ago The Huffington Post posted an article by James McGrath Morris called “Will eBooks Make Midlist Authors Extinct?”, a suggestion so dramatic (a.k.a Internet-friendly) that it led to much linking and re-blogging within the publishing community. The biggest difference between this article and the other “end-is-nigh” book industry predictions—a current favourite of most media—is that Morris narrows his scope to examining how the digital supply chain might effect the un-fancy, un-sexy long-tail. He argues that the midlist writers who sell enough books to sustain themselves but not enough to be considered bestselling will

But wait, don’t give up hope yet, that sweeping statement is not entirely true! Sure, browsing is different online and recommendation engines might favour bestselling authors over the lesser-known ones, but a digital tool does exist that is much more powerful and trustworthy than fickle old “serendipity”: metadata.

Here are some reasons why ebook metadata could help the midlist author:

1) It makes books discoverable. If an ebook comes hand-in-hand with rich metadata (excerpts, descriptions, author info, and carefully-chosen subject classifications and keywords groomed for SEO), potential readers will find it through web searching. In a bookstore, on the other hand, unless the bookseller happens to have an encyclopedic knowledge of every title in the store (unlikely) it’s difficult to help a customer find a book on a specific topic (ex. “teens and NASCAR”) if the subject terms or keywords aren’t in the title itself

2) It tells retailers how to promote the book. If publishers provide ebook retailers with more marketing information (something requested by Kobo’s Michael Tamblyn at BookCamp Toronto last month), titles will be promoted effectively; we can think about the “Top 10 Hair-Raising Halloween Reads”-type list as the digital equivalent of the bricks-and-mortar table display Morris mentions

3) Correct metadata can level the playing field. Every title is “face-out” online, while in bookstores they are mostly spined and only a lucky few are face-out. It’s true that customers are attracted to cover design, and this works the same online as it does in person. That means a customer browsing a list of ebooks, organized by subject, pub date, and price, will see midlist titles on equal footing as bestsellers.

Finally, here’s a real-world example of good metadata increasing ebook sales at UK retailer Foyles.co.uk, as described on The Bookseller:

James McGrath Morris, “Will eBooks Make Midlist Authors Extinct?” on The Huffington Post

Recaps of Michael Tamblyn’s ebook data requests for Kobo at BookCamp and Book Summit

The Bookseller, “Faber and Transworld dominate e-book sales, says Foyles”

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Posted in Online Marketing, eBooks | No Comments »

BNC 101: What is ONIX?

June 24th, 2010 by Meghan MacDonald

ONIX for Books is an international standard for exchanging important information about books and related products.

ONIX stands for ONline Information eXchange and is an XML-based language used for computer-to-computer communication. Since it is XML-based, it follows the same rules we outlined last week in BNC 101: What is XML?

ONIX doesn’t do anything; instead, it lets you describe what something is.

ONIX is a way of tagging information about your books — such as the ISBN, title, contributor, description, price, and availability. All of this data is needed to support the sale of your books in the supply chain, but it is also becoming more and more visible as websites and catalogues can use this metadata to populate their pages.

Where can you see ONIX?

Look at any major online retailer: all of the information that’s there is from an ONIX file. ONIX is also the information you see about a title in BNC SalesData . Soon, you’ll also be able to see it in BNC CataList and the ACP’s Canadian Bookshelf .

Why is ONIX important?

ONIX is crucial for effective marketing and for communicating with retailers and the customer.

The Sales Side

ONIX is how you transfer all of the information about your books that is needed to support sales. Here, I’m talking about information, such as:

Availability
Embargo dates
Expected shipping dates
Prices in different currencies
Publication dates
Rights information
Suppliers for countries and territories

Example: Have you reduced a price? Updating it in your ONIX file lets a retailer know about it and could influence them to increase their order.

The Marketing Side

ONIX is also important for marketing since it allows you to include information that goes beyond the basics, such as:

Awards
Canadian authorship
Descriptions
Excerpts
First chapters
Headlines
Initial print runs
Links to images, video, and audio
More titles from the same author
Other formats that the book is available in
Promotions information
Reviews and endorsements
Series and sets
Similar titles
And the list goes on…

Example: Neglecting to include Candian authorship and other regional information means that your titles will not appear in important discoverability platforms like the Canadian Bookshelf.

Everything you should be including in an ONIX file is information you already have, but for some reason a lot of publishers leave it out.

How can you make your ONIX files better?

Don’t make the ONIX file the responsibility of the one techy person in the office. Instead, make it something everyone is responsible for throughout the life cycle of the book. An editor, publicist, rights associate, and sales manager all have different material they can add and update in an ONIX file.
Put the information in as you get it instead of creating the ONIX file at the end of the process. You can create the ONIX file at acquisition and fill it out as material comes in.
Update your file when something changes and send it to your trading partners again — it should always be up-to-date.
Proofread your ONIX files. I’m serious — the sloppy errors that can be found in ONIX files are horrendous.

Some History

ONIX was originally developed in 2000 by the Association of American Publishers and EDItEUR . The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) in the US and Book Industry Communication (BIC) in the UK joined the team after that, and now there are representatives from around the world, including: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden and the Republic of Korea.

More Information

You can find all of our introductory blog posts in the BNC 101 category .

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Tags: BNC 101, book, marketing, ONIX, sales, XML
Posted in BNC 101, Biblio, BiblioShare, Education, Metadata, ONIX | No Comments »

Metadata Standards Visualization

June 24th, 2010 by Noah Genner

This is truly awe inspiring, overwhelming and very very cool:

Image from Stephen’s Lighthouse

“The sheer number of metadata standards in the cultural heritage sector is overwhelming, and their inter-relationships further complicate the situation. A new resource, Seeing Standards: A Visualization of the Metadata Universe, , is intended to assist planners with the selection and implementation of metadata standards. Seeing Standards is in two parts: (1) a poster-sized visualization plotting standards based on their applicability in a variety of contexts, and (2) a glossary of metadata standards in either poster or pamphlet form.

Each of the 105 standards listed is evaluated on its strength of application to defined categories in each of four axes: community, domain, function, and purpose. Standards more strongly allied with a category are displayed towards the center of each hemisphere, and those still applicable but less strongly allied are displayed along the edges. The strength of a standard in a given category is determined by a mixture of its adoption in that category, its design intent, and its overall appropriateness for use in that category.

The standards represented are among those most heavily used or publicized in the cultural heritage community, though certainly not all standards that might be relevant are included. A small set of the metadata standards plotted on the main visualization also appear as highlights above the graphic. These represent the most commonly known or discussed standards for cultural heritage metadata.

Work preparing Seeing Standards was supported by a professional development grant from the Indiana University Libraries. Content was developed by Jenn Riley, Metadata Librarian in the Indiana University Digital Library Program. Design work was performed by Devin Becker of the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science, and soon to be Digital Initiatives & Scholarly Communications Librarian at the University of Idaho.

I hope this resource proves to be helpful to those working with metadata standards in libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions.”

- Jenn Riley, Inquiring Librarian

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Posted in General BookNet | No Comments »

With Digital Publishing, Bad Data = Lost Sales

June 23rd, 2010 by Meghan MacDonald

Kobo gives us some examples of how data issues can impact your book sales in the digital market.

I tweeted the following from Book Summit 2010 on Friday during Michael Tamblyn’s presentation on The New Digital Reader:

#bksummit10 “Bad metadata = avg. delay of 10 days to market” - @mtamblyn @kobo

10 days?!? Can you really afford to lose those sales? Sending good quality metadata in the first place will help you get your books to your readers on time. And that’s what we all want, right?

I asked Michael to list the most common metadata issues they see at Kobo. Here is his list (in order):

ISBN: Difference in ISBN between ONIX file and epub file.
Often, if an ISBN has not yet been assigned to an epub file, the print ISBN will be used temporarily in the epub file. But you need to remember to update the epub file once you’ve assigned an ISBN.
Price: Missing.
This one was surprising to me and, to be perfectly honest, is just sloppy.
Territorial Rights: Missing or incorrect information.
The impact of incorrect rights information is huge. If Canada is not listed in the Rights Country element in the ONIX file, then the book cannot be sold in Canada.

Example

I’m intentionally being vague in this example and am not listing the title or publisher being discussed…

A metadata issue came up again on Monday when I saw a friend tweet about a title not being available on Kobo that should have been. The publisher weighed in saying yes, that title should be available for purchase in Canada… but this is what is being displayed on the Kobo website when you click through to the title listing:

…we do not currently have the rights to offer this content for browsing or purchasing in Canada.

What does that mean? Obviously I don’t have access to their data file, but my ONIX- filled brain immediately went to incorrect rights information. The publisher says it should be available, but Kobo thinks it’s not. Is Canada listed in the Rights Country? Probably not.

It is the publisher or distributor’s responsibility to make sure that the data they provide is accurate. We can get away with sloppy data when it comes to print books: if the books make their way to the retailer, the retailer gets to put them on sale (unless the title is embargoed, which is a different topic all together…). But when it comes to digital versions, all the power lies in your metadata — so you need to make sure it’s right.

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Tags: book sales, Kobo, Metadata, ONIX, online retailer, online sales, publishing, Tamblyn, XML
Posted in Biblio, BiblioShare, Bookselling, General BookNet, eBooks | 2 Comments »

BNC 101: What is XML?

June 17th, 2010 by Meghan MacDonald

What is XML? is the first in a series of BNC 101 blog posts where we’re going to try our best to break down some of the complex tech concepts we talk about all the time into plain language. Wish us luck!

Have an idea for a BNC 101 blog post? Leave a comment below to let us know.

XML is a term that gets thrown around the publishing industry a lot, but what does it actually mean?

First, XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. XML doesn’t do anything; instead, it lets you describe what something is. It is a text format that lets you define information for computer-to-computer communication. Basically, it’s a way to let two programs that speak different languages talk to each other.

I find it’s best to think of XML as content without form: XML is what is in the background describing what everything is, then how it looks is determined by where that information is being used. Some familiar examples of XML-based languages include: XHTML for the web, IDML for InDesign, and ONIX for book information.

Elements

Elements are the building blocks of XML. Think of these elements like descriptors, adjectives attributed to the content. Each bit of content gets described by the element. Elements are made up of opening and closing tags, and the content goes between these tags.

Elements look like this:
<tag>content</tag>

Or, for something publishing-specific, like this:
<Title>Canadian Book Market</Title>

XML allows you to describe infinite amounts of information, but it is the receiving program that decides what to do with it. If an online store receives your file, it will take that title tag and know to post the title as the title on its website. Some programs act on more of the described information than others, so to be on the safe side it’s best to provide more rather than less information to avoid blanks.

For example, if a book has a Canadian author, you would want to add an element that says the author is Canadian. Even if some receivers of the XML file won’t process it some will and it will be to your advantage.

XML always sounds big and scary, but really it’s just another version of something we’ve been doing for years in publishing: marking up documents in the same way you would a manuscript.

The publishing-specific XML language for transferring information about your books is called ONIX. Next week, we’ll post BNC 101: What is ONIX? — your introduction to online information exchange.

You can find all of our introductory blog posts in the BNC 101 category .

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Tags: BNC 101, ONIX, publishing, XML
Posted in BNC 101, Biblio, Online Marketing | 3 Comments »

Reading the Future

June 16th, 2010 by Chelsea Theriault

According to the results of The Bookseller’s recently released Reading the Future study, an annual survey of UK consumer reading habits, people are either getting tired of this whole digital-reading thing or just learned it exists.

(Caveat: “Released” might be too strong of a word, since you have to pay 89 pounds for access to the whole study, but they’ve given out some pretty interesting results for free)

The Bookseller used an online poll to survey 3,000 book-readers (defined as having read at least one book last year) and came away with “a wide-ranging look at the industry, with business critical data and information ranging from the ongoing effect of the financial meltdown on buying habits, the genres that are likely to go up or down, the key factors that drive purchases, from recommendations, to marketing, to television, and where customers like to go—and will continue to go—to buy their books.

Digital—from the Kindle and iPad, to the Google Books Settlement, to the Digital Economy Bill to Amazon—has dominated the book trade agenda this past year. So we thought it only right to kick off with that part of the industry that is generating the most comment, if it is only at the moment generating scant revenue.”

For those of us who don’t go a day without having a conversation or reading an article about the digital shift within the publishing industry, the results of this survey may come as a shock, or seem hilarious (Table 1 Row 8 and Table 3 Row 2 are particularly good for a laugh):

While yes, it only applies to the UK, and yes, I’m not sure how reading one book last year lets someone qualify as a “reader”, surveys like Reading the Future are essential refreshers on how the average book-buyer feels about all of the tech that the industry is currently concerned with. The Bookseller notes that readers are less excited about potentially owning an e-reader than last year, and you can’t really blame them; so many models have debuted or are in the works that it’s hard to determine which is the right one for you, and it’s so tempting to sit back and wait until the inevitable cheaper, better version comes out. I’ve never even heard of the BeBook Neo, Cool-Er or Elonex, and I try to pay attention to these sorts of things; why would the retired teacher in Northamptonshire know what a Kindle is? (OK, maybe because Oprah dedicated a whole show to it in 2008, but I digress)

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Posted in Book Data and Analysis, E-Readers | No Comments »

ISBNs — D’oi!! It’s 11PM — Do you know where your product records are?

June 16th, 2010 by tom richardson

You’d think you were at Market Day in Ganges there’s such PANDEMONIUM out there. Everyone’s talking about Product Identifiers — live twitter discussions, position papers staked by major organizations, and the BISG has no less than two dedicated industry groups (maybe three) discussing issues around ISBNs, e-Books and ISTC to make sure that their supply chain perspective is heard.

I’m lucky enough to be able to participate in some of the BISG discussion, quietly like a good Canadian will, but I know the Canadian supply chain wants to know what to do. Right now, the answer is participate. But maybe to give a flavour of what’s being talked about here’s some jottings from a recent meeting — points that came up that are being thought about, things that aren’t answered yet:

Using product identifiers in a closed system like Kindle or Nook, vs open systems where the identifier is actually traded to identify the product. What’s the best practice for each?
Libraries need to be able to buy for specific e-readers that are supported by them institutionally and are unable to because of a lack of unique identification and data. Library wholesalers are developing kludges to add the missing link.
Sales tracking — if nothing else, amalgamated sales for Best Seller lists? How can this info be combined… (ISTC discussions ensue)
Identifier BLOAT! No, wait: there’s DATA bloat too… (think about it: they are different and both real). It all costs and costs too much — this is about driving sales (or decreasing costs)
One record = One Product Identifier OR Hierarchical data? Who says we have to repeat everything all the time, endlessly just because version 2.8 of Dirty Sock Reader was released?
Sales rights: the responsibilities of 3rd parties to not sell when they shouldn’t, and the responsibilities of publishers to inform others about a book’s status.
Are we just building a giant disconnect? What is a product anyway — it really isn’t that clear in the digital supply chain…
GDSN / DOI / ISTC — Does DOI belong on this list? Discuss!

You get the idea. This is important stuff even if it tastes like thick dust. BookNet Canada is Canada’s publishing supply chain organization — but we answer to your pulls on it. This is how your business does business with other businesses — EDI, your records, your royalties are all wrapped up here. If what’s happening doesn’t support your need to communicate with your business partners, let us know.

LINKS

Twitter hashmark (live, Friday noon EST): #ISBNhour
Dec 2009 position paper from BIC
Feb 2010 position paper from the Int ISBN Agency
Book Industry Study Group (BISG)

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Posted in Biblio, BiblioShare | No Comments »

Should hyperlinks be in ebooks?

June 15th, 2010 by Samantha Francis

As a flurry of excitement mounts about the ebook, the iBookstore and various claims about ebook sales (Naturally, as part of BNC’s staff, I second Nic Boshart’s skepticism and also say “Show me the numbers!”), publishers are spending a lot of time and energy wondering what the ultimate ebook should look like.

One popular vision is that of a book jam-packed with interactive stuff, links, videos, and who knows what else. But before everyone gets carried away in the race to add all these bells and whistles to our nation’s literary masterpieces, I think that Canadian publishers should stop to review the debate about delinkification and link placement that is currently unfolding in journalism circles.

Technology writer Nicholas Carr has been lamenting the decline of our attention spans for long form journalism due to the way we use the internet, most notably in his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic. He has recently expanded his convincing case in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

He’s got a point; we are becoming more distracted readers. Some of us have become better (web) surfers than attentive readers. And many people are blaming the hyperlink—the very thing we’re talking about putting into books. Much hubbub has ensued, which Carr summarizes well (link below). Laura Miller, in her review of Carr’s book, experimented with delinkification by putting all her links at the end of her piece, instead of throughout the text. Her readers, for the most part, approved of this move while some critics are furious with this break from web orthodoxy. In a comment to Carr’s post, Miller reported: “My readers have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the change.”

Hyperlinks distract readers. Whether it’s a minor distraction (taking note of the hyperlink and making a decision about how to react) or a major distraction (leading the reader mid-read over to another page, perhaps permanently), it’s clear that hyperlinks and embedded stuff is a bit disruptive. And this is relevant to book publishers, whose entire business is based on making the longest things we read, a.k.a. the book.

So…

Is it in our best interests to embed hyperlinks in book text?

If someone is reading the ebook, we have the reader already. So is distracting them a problem?

If we don’t embed throughout the text, should we adopt a delinkification model, with links at the end?

Are we creating distracted book readers—and does this threaten the future robustness of book’s audience?—or are we ameliorating the book to cater to the new reader?

Links:

Nic Boshart’s “Show Me the Numbers!” on BookMadam.com.

Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic.

Carr summarizes the debate on delinkification.

Laura Miller’s review of Carr’s book.

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Tags: book, book of the future, e-book, ebook, embedded media, hyperlinks, reader
Posted in E-Readers, General BookNet, eBooks | 2 Comments »

Evernote to the fore

June 10th, 2010 by Tim Middleton

“Build products people lust after”

This is the advice given by the founders of Atlassian during the Atlassian Starter Day conference and it spurred me to write about Evernote (with a dash of Safari 5).

I have had Evernote on my laptop for a while but since I have been using my iphone more recently I’ve really become enamoured with Evernote. First off the caveats. I am not nor have I ever been an Evernote employee, I am not an Evernote superuser -yet, and this is just a pie-in-the-sky blog post.

At a number of technical conferences I have heard a lot of talk about workflow and the problem with getting writers to forsake word. And in response to that John Maxwell and his mpub gang have been promoting the web first approach to publishing, Hugh McGuire is on board and since then lots of people are coming out of the woodwork saying yeah we do that, and it has become obvious that there are lots of tools that are available to make this change.

I am thinking Evernote which launched in April 2008 and now has over 3 million users has a role to play in this discussion.

Evernote is a free suite of software and services designed for notetaking and archival. A “note” can be a piece of formattable text, a full webpage or webpage excerpt, a photograph, a voice memo, or a handwritten “ink” note. Notes can also have file attachments. Notes can then be sorted into folders, tagged, annotated, edited, given comments, and searched.

Not to mention you can sync between your mobile and laptop, add it as a gadget to gmail, google wave, and grab tweets using seesmic. On top of all this the Canon P-150 scanner comes with two Evernote-optimized settings, perfect for scans of documents, business cards and handwritten notes. With a push of a button your scans are sent to Evernote.

So my point is Evernote is a great research tool but it can also be used to create ePubs. As an experiment I used Evernote to grab some web clippings, take some photos, and create original text. I tagged each of my notes for semantic purposes and then I exported my notes as html. It exports as xhtml which I imported into Sigil added some more metadata and saved it as an ePub. Then I opened Calibre, added my new ePub, converted it to mobi and opened it in the Kindle.

I was just goofing around with a proof of concept that I haven’t really dug too deeply into but wow I thought, that was easy and Evernote made it dead simple from beginning, building my “book” with my iphone and laptop, to almost the end. I do plan to play more with this so will keep you posted (one thing I haven’t tested out with Evernote is it’s sharing ability i.e collaboration but I plan on attending one of Evernote’s new meetup events to get more ideas).

So where does Safari 5 come in? Well Apple just released this browser upgrade and one of the things it includes is a built in Reader widget. You browse to a page that has articles on it like …….
prereader button

click the reader button to get this….

postreader button

right click and add the page to Evernote…..

send to evernote

How sweet is that?

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Posted in Case Studies, Future of the Book, General BookNet, Mobile, eBooks | 3 Comments »

BookCamp Halifax (#bchfx10): The Value of Community

June 9th, 2010 by Meghan MacDonald

I attended and moderated a session at BookCamp Halifax 2010 this past weekend. As per usual I left feeling like my brain was exploding with new ideas, but instead of writing a session recap, I want to focus on why I think this BookCamp was successful.

If you want to check out videos of the sessions from BookCamp Halifax 2010, head over to haligonia.ca .

I started off the day with a session on online communities with Kimberly Walsh and Eric Rountree. At some point, someone made the statement that: if you treat the book like a social object, the community will figure out what it wants to do with it. I think that really set the tone for the day and we, the community, took it and ran with it.

At some point, every one of the organizers came up to me and apologetically said something about the unconference being small, and that they hoped for more people next year — but that’s not the point! It doesn’t matter what size the unconference, what matters is that every single person there felt like they were part of a community no matter their age, location, or professional background.

I think it was that sense of community — that sense of belonging — that made everyone feel comfortable enough to share their experience and opinions, both professionally and personally. The audience members totally hijacked the sessions, but that’s exactly what I wanted to see happen. Session moderators only did the introduction, then ideas bounced around the room for an hour until we had to cut people off. It was fantastic.

Great work to all of the organizers: Kimberly Walsh , Ryan Jones , Robbie MacGregor , and Eric Rountree . And a big thank you to all of the attendees — you made it your own and I’m glad I could be a part of it.

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Posted in Conferences, Education, General BookNet | 4 Comments »

Super Saturday a little more suped up

June 4th, 2010 by Tim Middleton

On Saturday I attended the CBA Super Saturday conference for indie booksellers. I sat in on a discussion that sparked a recurring dream of mine: Finding Hidden Money. Bronwyn Addico and Mandy Brouse (the winner of this year’s inaugural Chase Paymentech Young Bookseller of the Year), from Words Worth Books gave this talk and they were mostly talking about running events and the way that events should be run. First of all the similarities to the idea of providing local news in a hyperlocal model came to mind -

Hyperlocal:

Meaning “extremely local,” it refers to news and information about events within a community. The term was coined with the advent of user-created journalism after the turn of the century as well as Web sites that publish only news and information such as real estate, cars and other items for sale, but targeted to a town or even a zip code.

Hyperlocal, citizen journalism, microlocal, whatever you want to call it, has provided some hope for journalism in the attempt to cover under serviced local events and markets. And this was something that Bronwyn suggested that bookstores do. Read the local paper , follow local twitter feeds (ok, she didn’t say that but I add it here) and find out what events are going on and approach them to have a table at the event. What they have discovered is that revenue from events is like 5-10 % of their annual revenue (not sure if that is gross or not). While they talked about this I thought about some ‘techie’ things they could do to get ’stickie’. First off I have been thinking that booksellers could really leverage QR codes at these events. These are codes that you can embed information in, take people to your website, maybe your newsletter - however you want to use them there is strong possibilities for marketing purposes. Publishers are using QR codes more and more to take people to author sites and even provide enhanced ‘pbooks’.

with thanks to Mark Bertils of http://indexmb.com/

The Bookseller could have these QR codes on collateral for events -maybe on a poster, bookmark etc. Maybe the code has the list of books that they’re selling at the event for people to investigate later and maybe order from your website, maybe a list of promotions going on in the store, lots of ideas can emerge. True, QR codes are not that widespread, but people are getting more familiar with them and the bookstore will look like they are on the cutting edge. Low cost to get this kind of marketing initiative going.

I have also been thinking about publishing, surprising I know, but I have been especially thinking about it in connection with bookstores and thinking about ways that bookstores can leverage all the work they are investing in their newsletters and websites. The ideas coming out of web first publishing are as relevant to bookstores as they are to a publishers - just like desktop publishing enabled bookstores to publish newsletters, webfirst publishing allows them to make books and the espresso machine allows them to print books for events etc. What I’m thinking is obviously connected with the McMaster bookstore experiment with Campus Chills, but maybe even something more marketing oriented like a history of your bookstore with photos of the olden days; maybe the notes from all of your bookclubs; your year’s top picks for all of your favourite categories. The possibilities here really are unlimited. I know bookstores that hold writing contests, poetry contests, essay contests, and this material could easily be turned into ebooks, website material, and pbooks with a fairly good margin for your store because you are the publisher and the seller, and it is good marketing.

‘Please’ ,everyone is saying ‘not more shitty books!’ But seriously what are bookstores known for and good at? Curating, knowing the local community and being a center for all kinds of debate and dialogue. Why not extend those roles with easy to use technology?

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Posted in Bookselling, General BookNet | No Comments »

We the supply chain

June 3rd, 2010 by Tim Middleton

The sixth annual AMR Supply Chain Top 25 report has just been released and it has me thinking about the role that BookNet Canada plays in the publishing industry trying to raise awareness of the supply chain discipline and how it impacts business.

There is a lot to digest in this report but certainly it comes as no surprise that Apple has held onto the #1 position for the third year in a row. Apple’s success is attributed to its ability to consistently bring both operational excellence and innovation excellence to bear in some of the most competitive markets in the world. Furthermore, Apple has broken new ground in transforming a supply chain into a value chain by starting with the consumer experience and designing its network to serve that master first and foremost.

Recommendations:

Apply demand-driven principles to coordinate and integrate the functional areas of supply, demand and product management in order to better sense, shape and respond to changes in market demand.
Take a cue from the leaders when designing your own supply chain strategy. Think outside in, starting with your customers and working back through your trading-partner network to design a profitable response. Remember that one size does not fit all. Define how many supply chain types you have and design a customized response for each.
Balance operational excellence with innovation excellence for superior overall performance.
Focus on acquiring, mentoring, growing and retaining supply chain talent.
Measure your supply chain as your customer experiences it. Use the right supply chain and product metrics to consciously manage performance, and foster a culture that embraces measurement for continuous improvement.

Just in these points alone I think there is a lot for publishing to take away, but I would be remiss if I didn’t point out how the projects we work on everyday at BookNet can help you build toward the same kind of excellence as Apple.

BiblioShare:
Yes ONIX is a standard but it isn’t very valuable if companies don’t use it in a standard way. We often bemoan the fact that certifying publisher’s metadata doesn’t imply good data. So BiblioShare helps us get more consistent about validation and allows us to be as strict as we want to be about letting the data flow. Now we need to convince the industry that this is a good thing, and it is. It will help you to “to coordinate and integrate the functional areas of supply, demand and product management in order to better sense, shape and respond to changes in market demand.”

Pubfight and Interns:
With Pubfight (hey, who’s ready for next season?) and our intern program we meet a slew of young creative minds who have the energy our industry needs for transformation and we can provide them with a better informed picture of the supply chain so then the industry can have a “focus on acquiring, mentoring, growing and retaining supply chain talent”.

CataList:
Our digital catalogue project should help publishers better serve their retail customers which in effect will serve the reader better. I say should because there is a tendency to want to hold out on features that are too “retail” oriented and this is our cross to bear, to try to get to a solution that “think(s) outside in, that remembers that one size does not fit all. That defines how many supply chain types we have and design a customized response for each.”

Salesdata and Prospector:
Well this is a no-brainer. Transparency of the marketplace or “using the right supply chain and product metrics to consciously manage performance, and foster a culture that embraces measurement for continuous improvement.”

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Posted in BiblioShare, Education, Standards | No Comments »

Say Hello to the Copyright Modernization Act

June 3rd, 2010 by Chelsea Theriault

New copyright legislation is always a big deal. Not only does it stand to impact most of our daily lives, whether we’re loading music to listen to on the bus or trying to read a new ebook , but it is also an industry game-changer. For book publishing, a “copyright industry” that’s also trying to bridge the gap between print and digital, the current Copyright Act (unchanged since 1997) is sometimes like the little brother on crutches who can’t keep up when all we want to do is run towards the ice-cream truck (play along with me and imagine that the ice-cream truck is the exciting world of digital distribution).

The latest attempt to amend the Copyright Act officially began yesterday, when federal Industry Minister Tony Clement publicly announced the tabling of the Copyright Modernization Act (or Bill C-32). So what does Bill C-32 look like, and what does it mean for the Canadian publishing industry?

Notable amendments put forward in Bill C-32:

expansion of the definition of fair dealing to state that “Fair dealing for the purpose of research, private study, education, parody or satire does not infringe copyright”
prohibition of the circumvention of technical protection measures (TPM, which includes digital rights management or DRM), even if it’s just for personal use without financial gain
“time-shifting” for personal use (recording a TV show for later) does not infringe copyright
what Michael Geist calls a “YouTube exception” for the right to create remixed user generated content for non-commercial purposes
allowances for creating “back-up copies” of copyrighted files for personal use as long as TPM/DRM isn’t circumvented in the process

Bill C-32 shows an attempt to reform Canada’s Copyright Act by keeping two important designations in mind: that copyright law needs to strike a balance between the rights of creators and the rights of users, and that it needs to stay technologically neutral in order to avoid becoming quickly outdated. Yet all of the “user-friendly” exceptions to copyright infringement in educational and personal contexts are trumped by the DRM-circumvention provisions. This means that publishers (or any producers of digital media) need to carefully consider the way that technical protection measures are used with their content, since that decision now has legal sway over any of the consumer’s interaction with their digital material. While it may seem obvious that DRM is used on ebooks to try and prevent illegal copying, it has never been against the law to simply break these locks even if no copying takes place. Overall, it’s a good idea for everyone who creates content in digital spaces to grab a coffee and snuggle up with Bill C-32 to get a sense of it if, and when, it comes into law.

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Posted in Book Market, General BookNet | 1 Comment »

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