Joe Wikert's DisruptorFest

Inspired by children's ebooks

The third TOC Bologna took place this past Sunday on the eve of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. It was a terrific show and closed with a session announcing the winners of the Bologna Ragazzi Awards for digital publishing. You’ll find all the details about the finalists here and I’ve also embedded a short video below where you can see the winners in action.

I encourage you to watch this 7-minute video, even if you’re not part of the children’s book publishing business.. You’ll see some of the amazing things happening in this space and how they’re moving away from the boundaries of physical books as they take full advantage of the digital canvas. As you watch, think too about this highly relevant quote from Mark Sigal:

The talkie wasn’t destined to become silent film with words, so too it follows that in the age of smartphones and tablets, publishing will evolve to become much more than a simple carbon copy of print.

Finally, think about how the print model you’re so accustomed to might be holding you back from making more than “silent films with words.”

P.S. – Congratulations to PlayTales for their role as the platform used to create “Four Little Corners”, the Ragazzi winner in the fiction category.

A Nate Silver book recommendation engine

It's NCAA tournament time here in the U.S. and plenty of bracketologists are turning to Nate Silver for his statistical expertise. Silver, of course, is known for his book, The Signal and the Noise, as well as predicting presidential elections and Major League Baseball player performance. I'm not aware of any statistical analysis he's done in the book recommendation space but I know someone who has applied Silver's thinking to help us figure out what book we should read next.

I'm talking about Stephanie Sun and a terrific article she wrote called Nate Silverizing Book Recommendations. I encourage you to read the entire piece, even if it's been awhile since your last statistics class.

As you read Stephanie's article, think about how book recommendation engines are likely to get better and better down the road. As she also points out, it's not just about helping consumers discover their next great read. This same analysis can also be used to help editors prioritize their time when faced with a stack of manuscripts to review.

Many will cringe when told that this sort of curation and serendipity can be reduced to an algorithm. That's not what anyone is suggesting though; the algorithm can simply be one of many tools to help improve discovery. And although it will never be perfect, look at how search engines have evolved since the early days of the web. Today we're often limited to the very simplistic "people who bought X also bought Y" type of recommendation. We're still in the early days of solving the discovery and recommendation problem in our industry and we need smart people like Stephanie Sun to drive improvement in our search and recommendation results.

The Kirtsaeng ruling: What’s your opinion?

Wow. I’m very surprised by the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Kirtsaeng vs. Wiley case. I figured it would go the other way. Here’s a nice summary of the majority opinion from the Supreme Court (you’ll find more detailed analysis here):

Putting section numbers to the side, we ask whether the “first sale” doctrine applies to protect a buyer or other lawful owner of a copy (of a copyrighted work) lawfully manufactured abroad. Can that buyer bring that copy into the United States (and sell it or give it away) without obtaining permission to do so from the copyright owner? Can, for example, someone who purchases, say at a used bookstore, a book printed abroad subsequently resell it without the copyright owner’s permission?

In our view, the answers to these questions are, yes. We hold that the “first sale” doctrine applies to copies of a copyrighted work lawfully made abroad.

Read more...

What devices and formats do your customers prefer?

Most publishers create ebooks in all formats figuring it doesn't matter whether mobi is more important than EPUB or if the content is read on an iPad more frequently than on a mobile phone. That approach means these publishers have no idea how their content is being consumed. It also means they probably don't have a direct channel to their customers or some other way of polling them on their preferences.

At O'Reilly we like to stay on top of our customer reading habits and preferences. We monitor device and format trends through surveys and download statistics (from our direct sales channel). For example, here's a chart showing which primary and additional devices our customers read our books on:

As you can see, a computer is the O'Reilly customer's preferred reading device and the Kindle family is a distant second. What I find interesting here is the fact that Android tablets are much more popular reading devices for O'Reilly content than an iPad is. In fact, for our customers the small-screen iPhone/iPod combo is also a much more popular reading device than the iPad. Another interesting tidbit is that the iPad's popularity is almost exclusively as a second option, not the primary reading device.

Now let's look at preferred formats:

Here we see PDF still dominates; we learned long ago that most of the reading taking place on the computer is with PDFs, not EPUB or mobi files. This is a trend we've seen for years now and PDF doesn't seem to be any closer to relinquishing its format leadership status now than it was back in 2009, for example. And despite the Kindle's popularity EPUB is preferred much more so than mobi.

That begs the question: If the Kindle is such an important device for O'Reilly customers (see first chart), why is mobi a distant 3rd in format popularity? Is it possible our customers are loading their Kindles with PDFs? Sounds like a great question we need to add to our survey...

These charts reflect the preferences of the O'Reilly customer. Unless you also happen to publish technology books I'm pretty sure your results will look different from ours. But are you even taking the time to ask your customers these questions?

Reverse showrooming

This past weekend a friend asked me to pick up a couple of books for them. Print books, btw, and they needed them later that day. That meant it was time to head to a local bookstore, something I'm doing less and less of these days.

B&N was the closest and when I walked in I immediately realized why online shopping sometimes offers such a better experience than in-person. My local B&N moved all their categories around from the last time I was there and I must have circled the entire store three or four times just to find the two books I needed.

Then there's the reviews and top-seller lists I'm so used to seeing online. They don't exist in the brick-and-mortar world, so I decided it was time to do some reverse showrooming.

I chose the Amazon app on my Android phone, mostly because I know Amazon tends to have far more customer reviews than B&N. So I found myself flipping through the Amazon app while standing in the middle of a B&N store. I kept waiting for a store employee to walk past and make me feel guilty, thinking I was just buying the books from Amazon instead, but that never happened.

The whole experience made me realize, once again, that a chain like B&N needs to build a mobile app to make the in-store experience more pleasant and, dare I say it, rewarding.

The only mobile app B&N has is for the Nook. They offer nothing to help you navigate your local superstore. How about simple store maps so I can find the sections I'm looking for without walking all over the place? Yes, I know this has to be done store-by-store and updated regularly. And yes, I'm sure they like it that we're all walking through the store since maybe that means we'll stumble across something we weren't even looking for. I wasn't interested in serendipity on this visit though. I was on a mission and pressed for time.

Once they create this in-store app, how about adding some other features like deals-of-the-day? Base them on my purchasing habits. Make me a deal I can't resist and customize it for me. Feel free to mix the offers between print deals and ebook deals. Let me know about upcoming events and anything else I might be interested in, especially if it ties in with my buying habits.

All I'm asking is that they give me a reason to come back. Without any of this it will probably be a few months before I return. And when I do, the experience is likely to be as frustrating as this last visit. If Mr. Riggio is serious about buying the brick-and-mortar part of the business you'd think he'd want to implement something like this to improve the shopping experience.