This Monday, Digital Book World announced that they will be publishing weekly e-book bestseller lists every Monday on their site and in their daily newsletter. When it comes to e-books we’re all quite hungry know just what exactly is going on so it’s great to see DBW injecting unique insight into sales trends. Because the DBW lists are not based on retailer-supplied raw sales data, I thought it would be a good exercise to understand how the lists are generated, what they can and can’t show us, and what questions remain open.
Canadian Book Buyers and Their Relationship to Libraries
Voracious readers will often beg or borrow their books from anywhere possible—buy books in person or online, borrow from the library or steal from friends. As part of The Canadian Book Consumer we have the opportunity to drill down into topical questions and we’re interested in understanding more about how book buyers use the library.
Getting Editorial Insight from Consumer Data
As e-book publishing matures, the need for consumer insight becomes more urgent and the lack of it makes businesses increasingly vulnerable. The only analytics available with print were sales and reviews which didn’t make for a particularly enlightening post-mortem. Eventually with the web you also got customer reviews/ratings, blogging and social chatter, but we’re only now beginning to monitor these things systematically and they don’t always make it back to the editorial group.
So Long, Farewell, and Thanks for All the Data
When I first stepped into the BookNet office, it felt a little like I had the soft-footed and sneaky steps of a technology fugitive (albeit a sweaty one). Oh sure I’d been through publishing school, where I had the opportunity to dive into the world of tech and books galore, but that was … well, school. I wasn’t one of those tech and data people in real life, was I?
Book Prices and Book Value
How Can You Single Out E-Singles?
The Canadian Book Consumer and Awareness
Keep Your Head in the Clouds: Publishers, SaaS, and Cloud Services
Yesterday, I tuned in to a Publishers Launch webinar, titled An Introduction to SaaS and Cloud Services for Book Publishers. If you found yourself scratching your head in bewilderment at more than one word in that title, you’re not alone. The term “cloud computing” is often spoken at conference these days, and it’s time to unpack the jargon and look at the key points of the webinar: the benefits and challenges of cloud systems for publishers.
Books to Fight Over: The 2012 PubFight Catalogue
Metadata ROI, Standards and Best Practices, A Look from Canada
The BISG just released a report on “Development, Use, and Modification of Book Product Metadata” that was jointly sponsored by BookNet Canada. Its purpose was to try to track what happens to metadata—how it’s created, how it’s transformed as it moves through the supply chain, where it works and what the problems are.
