Towards a better book recommendation service
The ideal discovery platform requires not one, but many input sources
The ideal content discovery service has yet to be invented. Plenty have tried but none have truly succeeded. The latest is venture is BookScout from Random House. It’s a nifty Facebook app that uses your social graph to help you discover relevant content. As Laura Hazard Owen recently discovered though, it’s far from perfect.
Reading Laura’s post reminded me of something a wise person told me last year: Just because I’m Facebook friends with you doesn’t mean we have the same reading interests. In fact, I’d be willing to bet my reading interests don’t map very well to any of my friends, real or virtual.
Extracting value from uncertain data
2013 is the year you need to embrace "big data"
At TOC NY 2012 I made a point of telling attendees they need to learn the essentials of “big data.” It was still a fairly new concept then and a completely foreign one to most of the crowd. What a difference a year makes.
At next month’s TOC NY we’ll continue the dialog about big data and how it’s a resource every publisher needs to embrace. One of those TOC NY sessions features Rich Maraschi from IBM; I’ll have the pleasure of joining Rich in this session to help take big data from concept to reality.
High-quality PDF-to-EPUB conversion
Newgen's Silk Evolve is a powerful automation platform
How many times have you opened an ebook and noticed awkward hyphenations or other conversion errors? I still see this in the majority of the ebooks I buy and it’s clear these are the result of someone not paying attention during the conversion process. They may be minor annoyances but they reflect poorly on the publishers who produce them.
I recently had a chance to talk about this problem with Patrick Martinent, the CTO at Newgen KnowledgeWorks. They have a terrific platform called Silk Evolve that helps automate and reduce the errors when going from PDF to EPUB. The following Q&A is a preview to what you can expect to hear in Patrick’s session at next month’s TOC NY conference.
Length and spine width in a digital-first world
How these print relics are hampering digital innovation
I’m still working through this extremely long exchange between Nicholas Carr and Clay Shirky about containers and contents but one point keeps jumping out at me: We have got to get away from thinking every “book” has to be at least a couple of hundred pages long.
The Carr/Shirky discussion pulls in the oft-used music analogy. And yes, the shift to digital music meant we no longer had to buy the entire album. We are now free to buy only the tracks we really like. Many look to extrapolate that into books and claim consumers are dying to buy individual chapters. That may be true for a few genres but there’s a much more important lesson here.
Identifying DRM-free ebooks
Customers deserve to know the restrictions they're buying into
One of my colleagues, Edd Dumbill, asked me a simple question over the holidays that I thought I’d share with the TOC community:
Is there any way to quickly tell whether an ebook on a retailer’s site is DRM-free?
The slippery slope of bogus reviews
A very simple solution is right under Amazon's nose
By now you undoubtedly read about Amazon’s decision to remove a large number of questionable book reviews. This is a problem that’s existed since the first day Amazon reviews. Most are probably from legitimate customers but quite a few are undoubtedly from friends, family, and others who never even opened the book.
HTML5: The code to maximizing revenue
SPi Global's latest whitepaper is a must-read for everyone in publishing
Have you heard all the hype about HTML5 but you’re still not sold on it? You need to read the latest whitepaper from SPi Global. It’s called HTML5: The Code to Maximizing Revenue and it does a terrific job explaining why this technology is so important. The document is only 7 pages long but it will give you a solid foundation. Here are a few of my favorite excerpts from the whitepaper:
Abandoning the “walled garden” environment of downloaded applications also has distinct SEO advantages, because only one set of search criteria is needed to make content discoverable across platforms.
NY Times ebook initiative could be so much more
TimesFiles would benefit from a direct channel & community curation
The NY Times realized they were sitting on a mountain of valuable older content. Readers might discover it through search but why not curate and convert it into ebooks? That’s exactly what they’ve done with their TimesFiles initiative.
MediaShift on the future of print and ebooks
A roundtable discussion about where books are heading
I recently got to take part in a Mediatwits podcast for the PBS franchise, MediaShift. Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali were the hosts and the panel consisted of Miral Sattar, Jason Allen Ashlock, and yours truly.
Why I’m drinking from the Spundge firehoses
First there were RSS feeds, then Zite, and now Spundge
Have you heard of Spundge? I hadn’t till recently but I’m glad Kristen McLean, co-chair of our Author (R)evolution Day, called my attention to it. Kat Meyer and I got a demo of their platform last week and we were both very impressed. What makes Spundge so special?