ENTRIES TAGGED "analytics"

Building an ebook business around analytics

What happens when a web publishing business enters the ebook space?

AskMen, “the leading online magazine for men,” has just launched an ebook publishing program, using the PressBooks Publisher Platform to manage the front-end catalog/website, and back-end ebook production. In the year-and-a-bit since PressBooks launched publicly, we’ve worked with many traditional book publishers, big and small. But what’s most interesting to us is non-traditional book publishers entering the ebook space, because they have the flexibility to approach book publishing in whole new ways.

Especially interesting to us are successful web publishers, mainly because web publishers have the most direct understanding of their readers, and reader behaviour. This skill, and approach, will be critical, we believe, as book publishing evolves. Web publishing is an analytics-driven business. In the ebook world, timely analytics are very hard to come by. And generally, analytics is not something most book publishers prioritize in their business. We believe this will change, as book publishing becomes increasingly digital.

In the interview below, I explore the issue of web vs. ebook analytics with Emma McKay, managing editor of AskMen’s online magazine, and the leader of their ebook publishing program.

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For publishing, sales info is the tip of the data iceberg

For publishing, sales info is the tip of the data iceberg

Publishers have data, but they need to know what to do with it.

Kirk Biglione, partner at Oxford Media Works, talks about how publishers can gather various types of data and put it to use.

Emerging topics from TOC 2010

It's interesting to chart technical developments in the publishing industry against TOC's brief history. As Andrew Savikas notes in the following video, things like ebooks and mobile have evolved from small topics to dominant themes. If the pattern holds — and I don't know why it wouldn't — we'll see international markets and digital analytics claim more attention at…

Customer Loyalty for Mobile Devices

Some of the most interesting data on trends in mobile development has been coming from Flurry, an app analytics company (developers insert little snippets of Flurry code in their apps to gather usage data). They've plotted frequency of usage against app "retention" (what percentage of buyers returned to the app within 90 days of downloading it), and put each…

What Ebook Resellers Should Learn from Scribd

Scribd made a splash when they opened up a “Scribd Store” for selling view and download access to documents. Their terms (80% to the document publisher) are quite generous, though one reason publishers keep so much is that most of the merchandising (including pricing) is self service — Scribd could learn a lot from other media retailers if they’re interested in really promoting document sales.

Analytics: Are Streams the New Hits?

The definition of an online video stream can mean different things on different sites. This kind of ambiguity hurts everyone involved.

Overestimating the Home Page

Brett Crosby from Google Analytics says a home page is often mistaken as the most important part of a Web site. From TechRadar: Where are your visitors landing, bouncing, and viewing? It's often assumed user experience begins on the homepage, and this misconception drives many an ecommerce site to waste hours of design work in the wrong place. Search engines…

Web Analytics Primer for Publishers

We take a look at page views, pages per visit, unique visitors and other common analytic measurements.

News Roundup: Dual-Display E-Reader Prototype, Content Tracking Not Just for Takedowns Anymore, Indiana "Explicit" Law Struck Down

Researchers Develop Dual-Display E-Reader Researchers from Berkeley and the University of Maryland have built a dual-display e-reader prototype that uses traditional book-reading navigation (i.e. page turns, flipping the cover under, etc.). From the New Scientist: The two leaves can be opened and closed to simulate turning pages, or even separated to pass round or compare documents. When the two…

Content Tracking Tools: Control for Some, Distribution for Others

An article in BusinessWeek looks at various uses for content tracking systems, from command-and-control monitoring to partnership opportunities via broad distribution: Just ask Sarah Chubb, president of CondéNet.com, owner of sites ranging from the Epicurious.com cooking site to fashion site Style.com to WiredDigital, the online arm of Wired magazine. A few years ago, Chub enlisted a team of people…