A Canadian book blog: Publishing, marketing, books and technology from a Canadian perspective

Technology

Friday, January 20, 2012

An Apple for the Teacher: Apple’s big announcement

by Rego - d4u.hu, on Flickr">iPad <img src=">

Instead of an apple for the teacher, it’s time for an Apple. Or more specifically, an Apple iPad.

On Thursday, Jan 19, 2012, Apple unveiled its plans to remake the educational landscape. There were 3 announcements that interest me as a book person and affect me as a professor.

1. A free app called iBooks Author will let me, or anyone, create a digital interactive textbook. My gears are already turning as apparently from the live blogs, it’s very fast to create an ebook, which means I can cross off that New Year’s resolution from 2011 (I believe in carry over resolutions. I still have to make bread, which was a resolution in 2008.)

2. An update to iTunes U, which lets educators share and communicate curriculum with students using the iPad. There are a number of courses that people can take for free via iTunes U. This means I should check out whether I want to offer an online marketing course via iTunes U as you can apparently design and distribute complete courses, including audio, video, books and other content. I assume there’s a paid version too? Will need to check, unless some kind soul will tell me in the comments.

3. A new textbook store called iBooks 2, which is also a free app that will feature digital ebooks for schools. Major textbook publishers are on board, and I’m excited about the enhanced ebook possibilities for textbooks.

For enhanced ebooks, iBooks really offers the best capabilities. I really hope textbook publishers create some cool stuff here!

I’m excited about the announcement. What do you think?

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Type Books Animated Stop-Motion Video

I spent a couple of evenings reorganizing our bookshelves at home to be colour coordinated and organized by genre. Apparently so did crazedadman (read that one more time craze dad man). Not only did he organize his own shelves, he then thought to get his wife and a ton of volunteers involved in making this stop-motion video of animated books.

Lovely.

UPDATE:
Mark has directed me to another awesome site of photos of incredible bookshelves: http://bookshelfporn.com/tagged/unique

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Book Stuff in the News

ShelvAR
The perfect app for frustrated librarians dealing with mis-shelved books. This augmented reality app for Android devices makes rearranging a joyful chore. Developed by Miami University’s Augmented Reality Research Group. http://www.muarrg.com

National Post says “West is best”
Brad Frenette talks books and publishing on the westcoast with Billie Livingston, Ian Weir, Kevin Chong, Caroline Adderson, John Vaillant, Timothy Taylor, Annabel Lyon, Zsuzsi Gartner, and Steven Galloway. http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/04/29/vancouver/

Rejection Letters
Author Daniel Menaker offers a look at his collection of rejection letters. Bit sad really. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-menaker/a-rejection-is-a-rejectio_b_863291.html

How many books were published in 2010?
Bowker’s Books In Print reports their preliminary estimates of print books published in 2010. Wow, 3.1 million. http://lunch.publishersmarketplace.com/2011/05/when-anything-can-be-a-book-anything-is-a-book/

Philip Roth wins Booker but judge resigns
Carmen Callil retires from the Booker judging panel after the decision to give the award to Philip Roth, whose work she considers a case of ‘Emperor’s clothes.’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/18/judge-quits-philip-roth-booker?CMP=twt_gu

UPDATE:
A Book in Every Home
I forgot this story about getting a book in every home. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/a-book-in-every-home-and-then-some/

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Chromaroma: The London Tube-Travel Game

Chromaroma is game that turns London tube travel into a system of rewards and points for its players.

Players sign up with Chromaroma and then provide their Oyster Card data (London’s transit card), along with other details such as teams or friends they want to connect with on the site. Chromaroma imports the player’s Tube history and awards points for each trip. Players can track their stats and also see new ways to travel, new destinations or ways to gain bonus points by connecting with fellow passengers and discovering mysteries attached to particular locations.

Chromaroma from Mudlark on Vimeo.

Chromaroma seems like a great way to encourage transit travel in any city: team up with your co-workers, try to beat your friends’ point score, discover new routes or connections. Very cool.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Location-based Stories from Storytude.com

Storytude is a website and app for Android and iPhone that lets you find stories based on your location. The fictional stories based on read-world locations can be called up as a literary way to discover a city. At the moment, Storytude is focussed on Germany, in particular Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich and Cologne.

For those of you who speak German:
Website: http://www.storytude.com/
Mobile partner: http://www.mobile-melting.de/

Thursday, March 03, 2011

Technology Disruption and the Tale of the Despair

I tweeted about Matthew Ingram’s post Book Publishers Need to Wake Up and Smell the Disruption and received replies from my publishing friends that were inline with the comments Matthew received on his blog. But Matthew struck a chord for me, not with his outlier examples of self-published authors selling great numbers of books for less than a dollar, but with his comments about the accumulating evidence that Kindle and iPad are industry disrupters and, in particular, that they are going to continue to have an impact on author-publisher contracts. Again, we can argue about what we consider evidence, but this is my perspective from marketing, sales and technology.

1. Technology Continues to Transform the Publishing Industry

The Product Life Cycle for some categories of printed books is in decline, meaning that the revenue generated by that category has gone from development, introduction, and growth, peaked at maturity and is now in decline (declining revenue).

The cookbook category is a good example.

Cooks still want the content, but instead of buying 101 Fast and Easy Recipes they are searching Google for what they want to make for dinner that night.

And Google just made that easier by introducing Google Recipe.

In that Decline Stage, publishers have exercised all the options:
* Maintaining the product as is.
* Reducing the costs and finding new uses for the product (rejuvenating backlist)
* Lowering prices to liquidate inventory (hello front of store at Indigo)
* Promotion (reinforcing brand image, celebrity-driven)

But at the end of the day, this is a declining category. Due to brand or author loyalty, profitability may be maintained longer for some. Plus, product life cycle doesn’t map completely to a predictable sales forecast since, in the case of cookbooks, the product doesn’t stand alone. Each book category is part of a larger ecosystem, it’s not dying in a petri dish independent of other factors.

That said, Matthew Ingram’s post Wake Up and Smell the Disruption calls to mind that marketing managers do need to address the challenges that products in a declining stage are likely to face.

For example, in the case of cookbooks, would-be-buyers are also happy to access content for free online.

A common publisher argument is that the quality of a cookbook vs. the quality of an online recipe vastly differs.

Quiz:

Is the above image from a cookbook?
Or from a blog?

Answer


You know what, the answer doesn’t matter.

The fact that free content exists means that some would-be-buyers will chose free over quality, or just as good over quality, especially if free = as good as paid.

Cookbooks, Travel, Reference: the next publisher argument is that these are outliers. Maybe they are right now, but they won’t always be.

Kindle, Kobo, iPad and even mobile phones are changing the game.

Let’s just look at text-based fiction and non-fiction. I’m not talking about the reading experience of architecutre books, photography, or kids books, just basic text.

Here’s the competition in a would-be-buyer’s mind:
* Print copy, hardcover, of The Shallows for $33.50 from an independent bookseller
* Print copy, hardcover, of The Shallows for $21.00 from Indigo at a 34% discount
* Kobo, digital edition, of The Shallows for $9.99 at a 63% discount on the list price

The arguments about whether digital is a better reading experience or not are inconsequential to many would-be-buyers when presented with $9.99 vs. $33.50 or even $21.

If you said to someone, “would you like to pay more for that,” the answer is rarely “yes.”

Digital editions of books and app versions of books are directly competing with the print editions.

This is the disruption that needs to be smelled.

2. The eBook Buyer Is the Same As the Print Buyer

BISG’s publication “Consumer Attitudes Towards E-Book Reading” tell us that

* an ebook buyer is the same buyer as print
* same demographic/psychographic

In terms of marketing, this is good because we know these people. In terms of sales revenue, it’s bad because ebooks do not represent a new, expanded market audience.

The power buyers of ebooks are:
* 30-44 years old
* women
* employed
* they entered the ebook market 6 months to 2 years ago
* as power buyers, they buy weekly
* urban

In terms of unit growth, sales units are up but this does not compensate for lost revenue.

In our above example, $23.51 differentiates the ebook version of The Shallows vs. the print edition.

We are seeing at least a $5 differential for ebooks vs. print.

In addition to that lost revenue, as an ebook buyer buys more ebooks—becomes more at ease with reading digital vs. print, enjoys the simplicity of buying on-demand, and is rewarded with reading on the go or at night in bed with the backlit screen—they buy fewer hardcover and paperbacks.

Ebooks do canabalize print (especially when measuring revenue dollars).

3. Cash Usage and Cash Generation

The Boston Matrix developed by the Boston Consulting Group in the early 1970s isn’t without its faults, but it is a simple method for looking at market share (cash generation) and market growth rate (cash usage).

(This is the point I have mulled over the least so contemplate and critique vs. simply criticizing please.)

The four categories here are:

Dogs: Low market share and low growth rate. They neither generate nor consume a large amount of cash. Backlist titles.

Question marks: Rapidly growing but also consuming large amounts of cash. Because they have low market share, do not generate much cash. The problem child. eBooks and apps.

Stars: Strong market share but also consume large amounts of cash. Frontlist. Especially frontlist print+ebook. Stars, if well positioned, can become the next cash cows and ensure future cash generation.

Cash cows: Leaders in a mature market. Generate more cash than they consume. Generates a relatively stable cash flow. Value can be determined with reasonable accuracy. The ideal print book.

You can see, of course, the immediate limitations. I’m not sure how many publishers can quickly identify their Cash Cows, as the margins in publishing are so small.

The other issue is that the many factors of profitability are overlooked in this simplified view since the products in each quadrant are not independent of the others. A dog of a cookbook could still help another cookbook gain competitive advantage. The amplification of awareness for series, or the celebrity book that is really about giving the author competitive advantage over others on speaking circuits are other examples of how this ecosystem isn’t as simple as the above framework.

The reason I bring up the matrix is that it’s a starting point for discussing resource allocation and strategic planning for those products in a Declining Stage (print books) and those in a Growth Stage (ebooks and apps).

The growth stage is the period where sales increase as more customers become aware of the product and create demand, which fuels retailers to become interested in carrying the product.

Certainly what we are seeing with the growth of ebooks and consumer demand for Kindle and iPad.

Regardless of Matthew Ingram’s examples of outliers like Seth Godin, there are fundamentals publishers need to face:

1. Book publishing is a technology-enabled business.
2. A conversation about a technology-enabled business is a conversation about market changes.
3. We can argue about the speed of change and the type of changing coming, but we should mentally prepared for the fact that change is coming (like waves on a shore).
4. There is a lifecycle for everything. People argued to keep scrolls, but they printed those arguments in bound books. (See Johannes Trithemius)
5. Few people are successfully managing the product lifecycle in all 4 quadrants. (DRM and borrowing restrictions are not endearing consumers yet publishers are implementing these measures as a necessary way to support the required staff to keep both print and ebook development during this transitionary period. Matthew Ingram points out some of the mathematical challenges of the author-publisher contracts in his post, which aren’t endearing authors either, who I think are the glue that holds the whole thing together.)
6. “Change happens through a process, not a product” (Kate Fialkowski). The internet and ereaders have changed the way we read. Search engines, websites, wikis and blogs have changed the way we publish and share information.
7. The game changers tend to be outsiders to the industry. Music changed because of the development of MP3, which meant we could more easily share music, which led to peer-to-peer sites like Napster. Then iTunes changed the cost structure. Blockbuster > Netflix. Banking > Online Banking.

What I took from Matthew Ingram’s article was just another reminder that as Kate Fialkowski says, the game changers redefine the ecosystem, change the business models, price points, distribution systems, and support processes.

I’ll let Matthew respond to his commentators but for mine:

A coffee at Starbucks costs more than a $1.50 because they changed the game. They can demand $6+ for what tastes to me like shitty, burnt coffee with excessive sweeteners that will likely develop gut rot for an entire generation because they created demand for that product.

Publishers fearing the lost of authors and staff is not equal to fearing that one of them wins the lottery.

If you value an employee, you should consider that they could win the lottery and leave.

But really, the probability of an employee winning the lottery is pretty low in comparison to the probability that good people will leave the industry altogether or that the smartest will be picked off by start-ups providing incentives to acquire the best talent. See Open Road Media, Kobo and any number of interesting new ventures.

I don’t want to haggle over the definition of “lottery” but I can tell you that the folks holding the big cheques are the ones doing ebook conversion and app development.

And a happy dance can be a lottery in itself.

 

(People in the system are going to make money in unexpected ways. The ones who will keep making money are the ones who understand the motivating factors of their consumers and are able to repeatedly win them over. Excuse me now, I have a new iPad 2 to purchase. Let me know what books to buy.)

Thursday, December 16, 2010

I

CBC is important to me. Please sign the petition to keep it around.

 

 

Monday, September 20, 2010

Old Technology That I Explain to My University Class

I’m teaching Pub355: Online Marketing for Publishers at Simon Fraser University.

On Friday, I explained how university students in 1997 would have accessed magazine articles published prior to that year.
* go to the library
* search the internal system or the card catalogue to find the shelf reference number (if there was a physical copy available) otherwise go to the special librarian to get the microfiche
* schedule time to use the microfiche reader

Microfiche: Microfiche is a card-shaped piece of photographic film, usually 4x6 or 3x5 inches in size, used for the storage of miniaturized text in a grid pattern. It can be read only with the aid of magnification by use of a microfiche reader. Microfiche may contain a printed book, journal, or newspaper. (Source: lib.uwo.ca)

image
image

How fun does that look?

What ancient technology can I explain this week? Maybe the dictaphone (which is a word my spell check does not recognize).

Dictaphone Parcel from Lauri Warsta on Vimeo.

 

 

Sunday, September 19, 2010

What Book Publishers Can Learn from the Film Industry

Good article in the Globe and Mail this weekend about the film business, the long tail and how digital changes everything.

Have a read and remember Chris Anderson’s Theory of the Long Tail:

The democratization of the tools for production, democratization of distribution, and the ability to connect supply with demand has a huge impact on the cost of reaching customers, the choice in the market, changes to consumption patterns and a move from a small number of hits to a large number of niche products.

We see here the long tail of theatre revenue: ticket prices, popcorn.

We see the “experience” change as this media business discovered what they could upsell to make up for falling revenue: 3D, specialty food, games, dvds.

The cost of distribution (digital vs. film reels) should have decreased the ticket price. Instead it has increased and we’re blind to that because we’re paying for the upsells, or the experience.

Books, magazines and newspapers need to figure out the upsell.

Read the full article in the Globe and Mail.

In “The economics of the movie business” reporter Susan Krashinsky looks at what’s driven the film industry lately, and what will propel it in the future.

What fuels the industry? Studios + theatres

  • 2 major components of the industry: the studios that make the films and the theatres that show them.
  • Theatres are ok because they’ve created new experiences that audiences are willing to pay for.
  • Studios, like publishers, are in trouble. The challenge is falling DVD sales

What’s driving the industry: Concessions and popcorn profit

“Cineplex gets roughly 59 per cent of its revenue from the box office and 30 per cent from concessions, but the real profit is in popcorn. Theatres’ profit margins on a movie ticket are roughly 48 per cent of sales, but they get to keep about 80 per cent of what you pay for food. In the United States, those margins are closer to 90 per cent.”

How are things in Canada?

  • Different.
  • More choice
  • Canadian theatres, such as Cineplex, chose to franchise instead of seek more concession revenue. Specialty food courts in theatres bring in more cash overall.

“Cineplex chief executive officer Ellis Jacob said. ‘We do a lot more money per person than [the U.S. chains] do, and the reason is we’re giving you more choice.’”

Help us all. Apparently theatres will go the way of airports. Self-service drinks and payment processing.

What’s up with 3D and digital?

3D lets the theatre charge a $3 premium.

Why switch to digital projectors and 3D? Big savings

Pay attention to Anderson.

Digital is cheaper to make and ship than film reels.

“For Imax, a film print for one of its big screens costs about $20,000 (U.S.) while a digital print is closer to $200. Regular movies are about $1,200 (U.S.) on celluloid, but the savings on the digital are still significant for the studios, and agreements are in the works to subsidize those prints so the cost is neutral for exhibitors.”

Premium tickets: Everyone can be a VIP

When you can no longer charge the same for a digital experience as you could for a physical one, you have to find new things to sell. New points along the demand curve. For movies, it is 3D and premium tickets for reserved seating, leatherette chairs, bigger screens, VIP auditoriums for 19+ viewers, in-seat concession services and booze.

The international market is seeing fast growth
If you make a film with an international audience in mind, then you can capitalize on the marketing to an international audience. Rich Gelfond, CEO of Imax, cites the movie Inception, which is shot in various locations from Tokyo to Paris. “As studios try to sell to more global audiences, he said, they’re trying to look more global too.”

Global action: Imax follows the global trend

  • Imax.
  • More screens: China, Russia, Thailand and Kazakhstan
  • “In 2008, Imax released 4 movies in China, and this year, it will have 13.”
  • Edward Jay Epstein, author of The Hollywood Economist, says comedy translates less easily internationally but for action movies, “as much as 78 per cent of the box office comes from overseas.” Fill in the blanks by reading the full article: Globe and Mail

Monday, August 09, 2010

SFU Digital Strategies: Peter Armstrong on Lean Publishing

SFU Summer Publishing Workshop on Digital Strategies featured Peter Armstrong talking about how a book is like a start-up and why a lean publishing model is the way to go. Here’s his presentation.

Sunday, August 08, 2010

SFU Digital Strategies: Jenna Newman on Google and the Future of Books

Jenna shares her knowledge of Google and the Future of Books at the SFU Digital Strategies, Digital Publishing workshop.

Now, explaining the mysteries of Google’s

* Partner Program
* Library Project
* Google Editions

Google has the engineering quality and the data quantity to make them the leader today. Having more books means more content to index, more knowledge and more possible results. Plus, more pages to serve up with advertising, therefore more possible revenue for Google.

Google Book Search is possible because the scanned book data is integrated into general search results.

Partner Program targets publishers or rights owners (writers).
* Materials are indexed (from digital files from books that are digitized—printed books are scanned)
* Publisher decides what books are displayed and what percentage of the book can be displayed
* Material is browse only
* Buying options are available and the publisher can set the priority order of the buy links (i.e., publisher site listed first, then Amazon or other)
* Revenue stream is text ads

Google Book Settlement
* Started as the library project. They scanned entire library collections.
* Included books published up to 5 January 2009, includes orphan works, public domain works
* Google said “we’ll scan, you get a copy and we’ll get a copy too”
* Google will sell full-text access, which is why this is under review in the courts, read here “opt-out class action”
* Revenue streams: text ads, individual consumer purchase, institutional subscription fees
* Revenue share with the Book Rights Registry (which doesn’t exist right now)

Book Rights Registry
* Cost to run will be deducted from the publishers’ 60% revenue share
* In the partner program, there’s the publisher-Google relationship. In the settlement, the program requires you to pay for this additional level.
* In the partner program you can also see the insights (traffic, sales). Here, that info goes to the registry.
* The settlement has explicit rules that might attempt to overrule the existing author/publisher contract

The Settlement
* Because it’s opt-out, Google can now scan all the books it comes across regardless of whether the publisher/rights holder ignores Google or if rights holders have died or gone out of business.
* The settlement is the “other” category, it covers whatever is not covered by other agreements
* The settlement is not yet approved
* Books published after Jan 2009 are not part of the settlement

For Google, books are a giant database to be mined for content pages to index.

The deep mining of this data set means Google’s optical recognition software learns as it goes, making it the best.

Google Editions
* Not launched yet, concrete details
* Digital bookstore, not just discoverability (Partner Program), this is about sales
* Books are included by request
* Agency model pricing: 37-63% split
* This is the extension of the Partner Program. Users discover the books through Google Book Search and then buy via Google Editions
* Google will sell ebooks in whatever format and whatever geographic region where rights are held

The settlement is the default agreement and applies to eligible books (pre-Jan 2009) whenever another Google agreement isn’t already in place.

Google Editions may be combined with the Partner Program.

Regardless of the agreement, books will show up in Google Book Search.

Hey Publishers
* strengthen your own presence online
* optimize your site for search
* if you haven’t opted out of the settlement then claim all your books before 31 March 2011 (if you don’t claim your books, you get no cash payments)
* scan your own books (Google doesn’t give you a copy)

What now?
Full Google Books Settlement is available but don’t start at the beginning. Skip to Appendix M or N for the highlights.

(Joy’s insight: Google is creating incentives for rights holders to figure out how to sell your content more effectively.)

Saturday, August 07, 2010

SFU Digital Strategy: Christoph Kapp

Today I’m speaking at the SFU Summer Publishing Workshop on Digital Strategies.

Speaking now ...

Christoph Kapp, Manager, Library & Digital Services, Special Sales, Custom Solutions at Login Canada on markets and strategies for digital publishing.

Why focus on libraries?

Mount Pleasant Library ca. 1925

Example of a university library annual budget: $14 million
Majority goes to journals.
Libraries are places of discovery, connection, sharing.

$500 million a year is spent on content.

Libraries are in transition. As materials move online, libraries are no longer about paper books. This has initiated changes in the library environment and across Canada.

Librarians are not ...
Librarians in Smocks

Librarians are experts.
* Highly Trained
* And experience in training others
* Customer focused
* Matchmakers
* Quality Seekers
* Value Seekers
* Results oriented (usage is important, not just making content available)
* Sustainability oriented: Not just eco, but sustainable usage goals, ROI
* Strategic partners

UK - London - Bloomsbury: British Museum - Reading Room

Digital Content trends in Canadian libraries

Content of corporate libraries is not quite 100% but many are providing 90-100% digital vs. printed materials for their members. Their organizations are digitally publishing their reports and studies, etc. Corporate librarians are therefore well ahead of others bringing content online.

University libraries are catching up. They have a larger collection to oversee, which has slowed them down.

K-12 is the slowest to adopt digital. Many of the relevant teaching materials are not digital. Plus there are issues of availability/accessibility to funding for digital materials. Books and basketballs are easier to pitch for than funding for databases.

Card Catalog 2/30

Religious and private schools are slightly ahead.

Hospitals were slow to uptake but the spike is significant.
* Digital packages for ebooks are more readily available.
* Consolidation in the health care sector means that digital is a cost effective measure.

(Monique’s aside: I wonder what this means about Kindle and other mobile reading devices, or even content sent via the tv sets available at bedside. Devices walk but I wonder about materials distributed as a tv signal…)

Old infrastructure of hospitals (lovely brick walls, cables vs. air signals) also affects the possibilities in this market.


Challenges
Money is not the challenge. They have the budget. Proving the demand for your content is the challenge.

Coimbra - University Library Interior

The typical challenges fall into these categories.

Old-school digital: Can you get investment in new tools? If the current system is “good enough”, this is a customer issue that you have to leap.

There are so many digital options: The customer can be overwhelmed.

There are types and standards: ebooks, databases, DVD/CD/Audio, OEM/systems/gadgets, integrated and custom/bundles, file standards (pdf, xml, OeB, ePub)

There are platforms: aggregators, publishers, libraries

Aggregators are an option because publishers didn’t build their own platforms (where/how customers get access). So the aggregators built the platform and bought licenses from the publishers.

(Monique’s aside: Yet another thing publishers didn’t do for themselves, making their business/revenue dependent on a third party. Hello Google. Hello Amazon.)

There are pricing models: single download, subscription (concurrence, unlimited), perpetual (access forever—by paying a higher amount, you have access forever), local-load (started at Stanford, this is where UofT has invested in own infrastructure, they own and house and control that content), other

(Monique’s aside: how do you “control” and price your content? Local-load is an interesting spin because it’s the closest thing to “ownership” of the print book. Custom course packs look really interesting in this model.)

Scholar’s portal is owned by 22 Ontario universities and they can buy and access all the materials in this system. So 1 sale to the portal, with access to all. This creates interesting legal issues. The contracts define the usage.

(Christoph’s aside: Precedent setting Master license is coming soon with schedules for reference, trade, rate, and for textbook use. So far, it’s been 1 or nothing licensing. This is a totally different business model. It’s not open access, it’s 1 use at 1 time. When it’s not material adopted for courses, then it’s more open. This provides the content but manages the demand vs. the supply.)

Then there are periods: one-time, annual, multi-year, mix

(Christoph’s aside: California matters in publishing because it’s a good model to look at for Canadian publishing. Studying what happens in California is indicative of what might work in Canada. Similar population make-up.)

Content Is King. Or is it?

In libraries, “Content Is King” is re-written to “Usage Is King.” Librarians need to prove that the content is being used.

(Monique’s aside: Librarians want the People’s Prince, not the Inaccessible King.)

Collect, measure, analyze the usage = Deci$ion to buy.

Once again, this great info is from the SFU Digital Strategy session by Christoph Kapp, Manager, Library & Digital Services, Special Sales, Custom Solutions at Login Canada speaking on markets and strategies for digital publishing.

Now beautiful library photos:

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Book Review: Friends with Benefits by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo

Reviewed from Uncorrected Proof

imageFriends with Benefits
A Social Media Marketing Handbook by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo is coming out this November. Just in time for my birthday.

Lucky for me, their book publisher, No Starch Press, understands geek entertainment and they sent me an advance PDF. Yahoo!

Friends with Benefits is the best book on social media marketing that I’ve read to date. Why is it so great?

Reason 1
My friends wrote it and 3/4s of the way through there’s a screenshot that includes one of my Facebook updates.

Ok, no really, there are better reasons than that.

Reason 2
Friends with Benefits is one of the few books that offers social media marketing case studies with accompanying stats. Although every company has to set their own baseline for metrics, having a reasonable idea of what to expect is critical. Much of this private info is never shared, which means it is hard for a marketer who’s new to social media to answer the boss’s question, “what do I get for this investment in social media.”

Reason 3
There are great passages and quotes.

“The connections we make with other people online are real.”

“The Internet has become a public venue where the audience responds to news reports, suggests stories to cover, and even reports on stories.”

“Marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. A successful campaign is usually the result of a hundred correct decisions and actions.”

Reason 4
Friends with Benefits answers the question, “Why would I want social media when my standard marketing practices are safe and known?”

If you’re a marketer dependent on mass media, then understanding web 2.0 as explained by Barefoot and Szabo will shoot you light years ahead of your competition.

The quick history in the first chapter helps establish the customs and culture that make up the web today; and how PR professionals can work within that framework.

Friends with Benefits is a must-read for social media marketers and those new to the field. There’s stuff for everyone, including the case studies I mentioned above, the reasonable expectations set around metrics, the how-to checklists and the great tips on the tools.

Who is Friends with Benefits for?
Anyone who wants:

  • More website visitors
  • More incoming links
  • More subscribers to your RSS feeds
  • More views of your content on video- and photo-sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr
  • More references to your company, products, and services on blogs, podcasts, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, ...
  • More followers on Twitter
  • Better search engine optimization
  • More genuine interactions with your customers

Good job Darren and Julie! I look forward to seeing the book in stores.

Andre Charland, Darren Barefoot, Julie Szabo
Darren and Julie with Andre Charland from Nitobi at IMC Vancouver 2008

Download Chapter 4 from the No Starch site: “Netiquette: Miss Manners for the Web” (PDF)

 

 

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Technorati: Do You See Me?

8h8fzirab4

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Digital Publishing: Connecting Publishers to New Media Consumers

Hello Publishing Friends! SFU has a workshop coming up Digital Publishing: Connecting Publishers to New Media Consumers.

July 23 - 24 | Thursday - Friday | 9 - 5 pm
Fee $275 CDN (all course materials provided)
Details on the Course
Registration info.

Digital Publishing: Connecting Publishers to New Media Consumers
Formats. Futures. Channels.

While most publishers are beginning the process of digitizing their back lists, digital technology has gained a toe hold in helping publishers market their front lists as well. No longer are titles digitized and pushed through select channels to have the process stop there. Content can be moved, indexed and combined with other publishers or books.

This two-day workshop, presented in conjunction with the Association of Book Publishers of BC, will consider success stories such as Japan’s $220 million in sales with Manga. We will also learn from some of the less successful initiatives.

And we will consider channels of distribution and the markets that are not being fully explored and developed, such as India where a significant majority of those attending universities speak English and whose market is primarily digital. Publishers need to have a defined digital strategy, much like their business mandates and business plans.

This workshop will provide answers and prompt questions to get the information you need to create your own digital roadmap. If you are not doing something, you may find you will soon be playing catch up. By the end of the two days you will understand the phrases and definitions and identify what kinds of formats best suit your needs. Some key points you will learn:

• Determine which formats can best deliver your content
• Determine business objectives for an initial foray into digital publishing
• Determine your requirements from third party service providers
• Understand XML
• Discuss the pros and cons of DRM
• Hear what the future of publishing may look like

This is an excellent workshop for new publishers, smaller publishers, or larger more established publishers who are past the thinking stage and want to begin to implement a digital strategy for their companies.