When I moderated a panel at our Tech Forum West in Vancouver last week called “Using The Numbers to Optimize Your Sales Strategy,” I got to sit down with three data nerds who work in the industry and discuss what publishing houses—sales departments, in particular—do with those precious sales numbers.
Breaking the Page without Hurting the Reader
Enhanced books are truly amazing. It seems like everyday a new kind of enhancement is announced or shown off. Videos and images can be embedded or made to pop up, text can be hyperlinked, music can be played, table of contents and indexes can be reinvented and repurposed. But while it’s fascinating to see what can be done, we need to ask ourselves should it be done. Developers can build just about anything, because they’re such a talented bunch, but that doesn’t mean the reader wants it in their e-book.
This is why it seemed like a good time to devote one of our conferences to enhancements and apps. Tech Forum West will do just that this fall.
Do Publisher Apps Actually Make Sense?
Yesterday, Eoin Purcell wrote a blog post called “The Opportunity Apple Just Created For Publishers” pointing out the obvious that we somehow haven’t picked up on. But I’m skeptical that publishers are in a place where they can take advantage of the opportunity to sell directly through their own apps.
Subscribe Me to Your Leader
Angry Robot—a British Sci-fi publisher—has recently made the headlines of some trade magazines by coming out with a subscription model for their e-books. Is the subscription model something that general trade publishing can act on?
Is Pottermore a Game Changer?
Book Summit: Chekov, E-Reading, and Transmedia
BookNet Canada was at the 10th Book Summit last Friday to witness a collective train of thought that included biodiversity, Chekov, video games, and fan fiction.
They're Always After Me Red Lemonade!
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?
E-Book Advertising Is Here
There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about Harry Hurt III’s upcoming e-book. Hurt sought out many sponsors for his book, which sounds like it involved a lot of travel (i.e., is expensive for the author to write). The sponsors gave him money, equipment and products in exchange for ads inside the book and “significant product placement woven throughout [the book’s] narrative.”
Will readers mind the advertisements in the book? Is it possible to work product placement into your narrative seamlessly?
