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Sourcing Books on Wall Street
A company can grow organically (investing in new product, developing new channels to market, improving customer service, in other words innovating) or it can grow by mergers and acquisition (M&A)....
View ArticleDoes the Acquisition of BookLamp Signal Apple’s Entry Into the Ebook...
In March of this year, shortly before Apple bought ebook recommendation start-up BookLamp, music subscription champion Spotify made a very similar acquisition. Spotify bought music recommendation...
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In God We Trust, All Others Must Bring Data
“In God we trust, all others must bring data” is a line attributed to statistician William E. Deming and was first uttered almost half a century ago. Publishers today talk with great urgency about...
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Publish and They Will Come…Right?
We live in an age of abundance, which means discoverability matters more than ever. By some accounts, as many as 1 million new books are being published every year in the English language alone. In...
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Should Authors and Publishers Spy on Readers?
Okay—that title is slightly provocative. But it’s not an unreasonable question to ask. Traditionally, authors and publishers knew nothing about how readers actually read books. Book publishing was, and...
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What Code Is Revealing About Readers
There’s a brave new world in book publishing, and it’s being shaped by and around audience insights. Not only are publishers becoming more adept at using data to work smarter, but code and algorithms...
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The Fear of Data
Change leads to anxiety, and there has been a lot of change in publishing in recent years. There is one trend, though, that is striking more fears in publishers’ minds than any other. And that is the...
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If You Sell the Book, Will They Read It?
At the IDPF/BE conference in May of this year, Kobo disclosed data that revealed only 60 percent of books purchased are ever opened. And that says nothing about whether they are even finished....
View ArticleThe Internet of Bookish Things
The Internet of Things, or IoT for short, is one of those buzzwords that is making the rounds in Silicon Valley. Earlier this month, many of the electronic gadgets on display at the Consumer...
View ArticleReading Fast and Slow – Observing Book Readers in Their Natural Habitat
In last week’s post, I introduced the notion of the “Internet of Bookish Things,” and how ebooks were now nodes on the Internet that could record how books are being read. In this week’s post, I will...
View ArticleStart Strong or Lose Your Readers
In the first post in this series, I introduced the notion of the “Internet of Bookish Things” to describe how ebooks were now nodes on the Internet that could record how books are being read. And in...
View ArticleWhat Books Have the X-Factor? Measuring a Book’s Net Promoter Score
In the first post in this series, I introduced the notion of the “Internet of Bookish Things” to describe how ebooks are now nodes on the Internet that can record how books are being read. Over the...
View ArticleMen Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, But What About Readers?
The recent decline in ebook sales has led many pundits to pronounce that the digital revolution is over. Admittedly, this is indeed the end, but merely the end of the beginning of how ebooks will...
View ArticleHow Does Age Affect Reading?
Last week I explored how reading behavior differs between men and women. The analysis was based on observations that Jellybooks made as part of reading analytics studies with publishers that recorded...
View ArticleData-Smart Publishing: New Ways of Working for Publishers
The recent slowdown in ebook sales has led some publishing observers to pronounce that the digital publishing revolution is over. The truth is, this is indeed the end, but merely the end of the...
View Article8 Reasons Why People Buy Books
Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been reporting on observations that Jellybooks has made about readers after collecting data about when, where and how they read. Do readers rant or rave about books? Do...
View ArticleData Vs. Instinct – The Publisher’s Dilemma
It might as well be time to address the elephant in the room. The pachyderm that is causing fear, uncertainty and doubt among authors, agents and publishers is the prospect of how data, and reading...
View ArticleIt’s the Cover, Stupid! Why Publishers Should A/B Test Book Covers
Never judge a book by its cover. So the saying goes, yet consumers do it all the time. Every publisher and bookseller knows that covers sell books. But do consumers also form expectations from looking...
View ArticleForeign Rights and Reader Analytics
Next week the London Book Fair will take place at Olympia in Kensington. This is one of the preeminent events for trading foreign rights in literary works, and I will therefore take the opportunity to...
View ArticleThe Great Amazon Page Count Mystery
How Amazon pays authors for work included in Kindle Unlimited (KU) made headlines across the inter-webs recently. Ann Christy’s post “KU Scammers on KU – What’s Going On” even made it on to the...
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