Marketing

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Reading for the Holidays?

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BookNet Canada’s November 23 Code Meet Print session looks at the brave frontier of …reading! The session, called Reading Is Social, is timely as we move into the season that everyone in the book industry is pumped for—the holidays! Are people still going to buy that someone special a dead tree copy of that great non-fiction title, or are they thinking about how they can really show they care by getting involved in the latest greatest trends in e-reading? How are they going to decide what to pick up for their Secret Santa exchange? Where will they find out about new books?

Questions like these made us wonder: How is the book industry leveraging game mechanics, crowdsourcing, and social platforms to make reading even more attractive?

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BookLamp and Whichbook: Two Solutions to the Online Book Recommendation Problem

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We’ve all had a helpful bookseller recommend a book at some point. They have those freakish encyclopedia brains that remember every book they have on their shelves. The problem, though, is that more and more people are making purchasing decisions online and it is very difficult to replicate the helpful bookseller experience on the web. Two book recommendation engines—BookLamp and Whichbook—are trying to solve this problem.

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Online Reviews Sell Books, So Let People Post Them

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Customer reviews are becoming an increasingly common element of product sites. Customer reviews have been on Amazon.ca for as long as I can remember and they’re also on the Chapters website. Reader reviews fuel Goodreads. But why haven’t publishers jumped on board, especially those selling directly from their sites? And why aren’t customer reviews being built into a retailer website creation or redesign?

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Canadian Bookshelf, eh?

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If you haven’t already visited, Canadian Bookshelf, I would highly recommend you take a little time to do so. The site itself looks great and there is a plethora of great (Canadian) content already there with more to come. I won’t go into all the features and functions of the site here as you can just go and try it out or read about it on their blog, but I will point out why we like this project in one word: collaboration.

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It's the Little Things: CataList Details

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We have been busy with CataList lately. Yes, we’ve been signing up publishers and booksellers on the system and helping them get started. We’ve had several online demos. But what people don’t realize is that we’re also continuing to work on CataList itself. We’re adding new features to it all the time in response to user feedback. It’s the little things that make a difference with a product like this, and we wanted to show you three of the ones that have been most useful so far.

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They're Always After Me Red Lemonade!

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Richard Nash needs no introduction but if he does you can do no better than to tune into the talk he gave at the 2010 BookNet Technology Forum. Nash has been re-imagining the business of publishing for some time and, in fact, left his post at Soft Skull to begin building that re-imagining.

Red Lemonade, his new project, is all about connecting readers and writers and has that social community goodness baked right in. There are no walled gardens here.

Does this on its own reinvent publishing?

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A Book Algorithm that Works

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Many businesses use algorithms to make product recommendations, including book retailers such as Amazon and Chapters. If your customer base is large and mostly online it’s an easy way to generate recommendations for a wide range of customers. But when it comes to books, the system hasn’t always served the customer well.

 

 

BookNet Canada is a non-profit organization that develops technology, standards, and education to serve the Canadian book industry. Founded in 2002 to address systemic challenges in the industry, BookNet Canada supports publishing companies, booksellers, wholesalers, distributors, sales agents, industry associations, literary agents, media, and libraries across the country.

 

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