Joe Wikert's DisruptorFest

Here’s another way digital could complement print

As I’ve said before, the publishing industry needs to get beyond the current “print or digital” mindset and instead explore ways for one to complement the other. Plenty of industry stats show that most readers are comfortable with either format and many prefer the convenience of switching between the two (e.g., reading the news digital but mostly sticking with print books).

After several years of going exclusively digital with books I have to admit I’ve been reading a few more print books lately as well. Sometimes it’s because the book was given to me and other times I simply opted for the format that was right in front of me at the store.

What I’m finding though is that the reading experience would be better if we could narrow the gap between print and digital. Here’s a great example: As I continue reading The Content Trap I’m highlighting more and more passages. When I do that with an ebook I can quickly search and retrieve those highlights using my phone, my iPad or whatever device is handy. With print books, those highlights and notes are only accessible if the physical book is nearby.

I’d love to see someone develop a service where I can take pictures of the print pages with my yellow highlights and allow me to upload them to a cloud service where they’ll be converted to a digital format. Since I’ve now got a nice library of both Kindle and Google Play ebooks, it would be even better if I could add those print highlights to my existing bookshelves.

Oddly enough though, the Kindle platform doesn’t even allow me to do a full text search across my entire ebook library. The magnifying glass tool in the Kindle app merely searches titles and author names, not the book contents. Imagine how nice it would be if you could search the contents of your entire ebook library and, that same search could also include the highlights from the print books you’ve read?

There would obviously have to be limits to the amount of highlighted or excerpted content you could convert with this type of service. Google, Amazon and Apple are uniquely positioned to offer that print-highlight-to-digital conversion since they already have all the content in their content management systems. As you upload those pictures of print pages with highlights they could quickly identify the source title, automatically adding the cover and metadata to the converted results. A social element could be integrated, enabling you to share some number of highlights with your friends and followers, powering better digital discovery of print content.

How cool would that be? Your print reading experience could finally entire the digital and social worlds.

Greedy publishers could quickly kill this concept, insisting on some sort of monthly fee or other upcharge for their content to be part of this solution. They’d probably argue that if a reader wants to create digital highlights they should buy the ebook as well as the print book. Good luck with that approach.

I hope one or more of the major e-reading platforms offers this type of service soon. I’d lobby pretty hard to get the entire OSV library included in it, free for users, resulting in better discovery and incremental sales from reader friends and followers.

“The Content Trap” is the must-read book of the year

A recent trip to a local brick-and-mortar bookstore helped me realize that even the best algorithms and email campaigns can’t replace in-person product discovery. I noticed a book called The Content Trap sitting face-out on the shelf and couldn’t resist picking it up.

Great title. Intriguing outline. Normally I’d make a note to grab the ebook sample and consider buying it later. What I saw during my in-store flip test convinced me I shouldn’t wait. So, I made the unusual decision (for me) to buy the print copy, not the ebook.

As I walked out of the store it dawned on me: Despite all the daily book recommendation emails I get from Amazon and elsewhere, this one never hit my radar till I walked through that store. Actually, maybe one of those emails actually did mention it, but I never noticed because I receive so many book promo messages that they’ve turned into nothing more than in-box white noise. This seems to indicate the email marketing model could benefit dramatically from an overhaul.

If so, the vision shared in The Content Trap likely provides at least a portion of the new formula. It’s been awhile since I broke out a highlighter and started marking up a physical book. I’m only a few chapters into The Content Trap and I’ve already highlighted dozens of important passages. In fact, it ran my old highlighter dry so I had to buy a new one.

This is one of those books that really makes you stop and think, so don’t assume you’ll be able to tear through it in an afternoon. Here are a few of the more fascinating segments I’ve read so far:

The language for success in media, as in technology, is less and less about content and more and more about connections.

It’s striking how many digital media managers still think in terms of product appeal to individual customers rather than in terms of managing and exploiting connections. This is even more surprising in view of the fact that media consumption has always been inherently social.

Through its Marketplace, Amazon had shifted strategy from selling products to owning a platform. A similar “content versus platform” choice confronts many organizations today.

Superior products are great, but strategies that exploit connections are better.

Can we help readers to help each other? [That last question helped one publisher shift] from being important to being relevant, as one editor put it.

Btw, those quotes are all packed into the first 30+ pages. I can’t wait to read the rest of this book. I also just started following the author, Bharat Anand, on Twitter and encourage you to do the same. This guy is brilliant.

Do yourself a favor and buy this book immediately. You won’t regret it and you’ll be well armed with an entirely new way of thinking as 2017 begins.

This idea is both a consumer feature and a marketing opportunity

We take it for granted that when we open our favorite ebook app it automatically jumps right into the last book we were reading. And while that’s handy, I’d like to see at least one other option when I open the app.

How about a reader-customized landing page? This page should be fully configurable, based exclusively on my particular interests. For example, we all have our favorite genres, topics and authors we like to follow. Let’s start off by allowing readers to place a widget on this landing page showing the top five bestsellers in their favorite category.

Another widget I’d love to see is a quick-and-easy way to grab samples of newly published (or upcoming) books in my preferred categories. So maybe a top five list again with a one-click-sample download button next to each cover.

Then there’s the social opportunity… I recently asked one of my good friends to tell me the best WWII books he’s read over the past few years. That was done through a combination of texting and email. How about adding a capability to this landing page so I can quickly find (or follow) my most trustworthy friends and answer that question right in the reader app? Both of us would have to opt in, of course, but what a great way to share and access highly relevant information, especially when it’s in such close proximity to the one-click sampling/buying process.

You’ve undoubtedly seen some of this functionality on your favorite retailer’s website or through their email marketing campaigns. That’s great, but sometimes I go to amazon.com to buy dog food, not books, and my email inbox is already overflowing with other marketing messages. Frankly, I think I’ve become numb to all the sales pitches that hit my inbox every day. Now compare that to the time when I’m opening the Kindle or Google Play Books apps on my iPad; that’s when I’m focused on books, but not just reading…I’m often ready for book discovery when I launch those apps, so why not help me find what I might be interested in?

I also realize most of the time we might want to just leave well enough alone and continue jumping right back into that last book we were reading. Great, but how about placing a button in the app’s nav bar to quickly take me to this configurable landing page?

Another nice touch would be to let me customize the feeds by day and time. For example, if I’m opening it up during business hours I’m probably looking for work-related content. But let me also configure it to show sports and history lists and samples when it’s after 5PM or on the weekend.

You’d think that Amazon would already offer something like this in the Kindle app. All the other reader apps tend to follow their lead and since books now represent such a small slice of Amazon’s overall revenue it would be great to see some other ebook retailer step up and innovate with a service like this.

Solving discovery with better content marketing

Ask a publisher to tell you the biggest challenge they face today and you’ll get a variety of answers. I know because I’ve been asking publishers for quite awhile now. I also made sure I posed the same question to the 20+ publishers I met with at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair.

Although the answers vary there are a small number of popular responses. One of the most common ones is simply “discovery”. Publishers are concerned that their content will never rise above all the marketplace noise.

One of the keys to addressing discovery is to focus on where consumer eyeballs already are. Facebook is a terrific example. As the planet’s largest social media network it represents an enormous opportunity for content discovery and consumption.

But go to any publisher’s or author’s Facebook page and what do you see? Mostly timelines with tips, comments and observations. Many authors that I’ve spoken with tell me that they’re trying to quickly redirect Facebook visitors to their personal websites where they have more control over things like sharing content samples with prospective customers. These same authors tell me they realize they manage to get far less than 100% of those Facebook visitors to click through, so many visitors leave without ever sampling the author’s content.

Other publishers and authors tell me they love it that they have tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of Facebook likes, but they don’t see any way to engage more deeply with those fans. As one author put it, “most people probably simply like my page and never come back.”

I’m pleased to announce that the Olive Software team, where I’ve had the pleasure of working since 2013, has come up with a way to help publishers and authors make their Facebook pages more engaging. And while it’s not limited to Facebook, let’s start there…

For a live example of this, check out best-selling author Valorie Burton’s Facebook page. It looks like a lot of author Facebook pages, right? One key difference is the “Read FREE Sample” button in the page’s nav bar. Click it and you’ll be taken to this view of her page; there the timeline has been replaced by a sample of her blockbuster hit, Successful Women Think Differently.

Rather than asking visitors to jump to another site or go through a multi-step process to download her sample, Valorie now lets them experience it right there on her Facebook page. And thanks to Olive’s SmartLayers capabilities, we were able to quickly add a call-to-action at the end of the sample where readers can buy the book from their favorite retailer.

I mentioned this capability isn’t limited to Facebook. Olive’s platform presents content directly in the browser, so there’s no app to download and no plug-in to install. That means the same sample widget you see on Valorie’s Facebook page can also be docked on an author website, on a publisher’s catalog page and even right inside the message body of an email marketing campaign. That’s right, publishers can now embed their ebook samples in email messages and not force readers through a bunch of multi-click gymnastics before they can even experience the content.

This solution goes well beyond samples, btw. A couple of publishers I’ve shown it to noted how they could resurrect some of their older, long-tail titles by publishing them in a serial fashion on their website, Facebook page and elsewhere. Their plan is to put the first chapter up one week, then replace it with the second chapter the next week, etc. They see this as a way of encouraging readers to visit their website or Facebook pages regularly, not just clicking a like button and never coming back.

It’s time for publishers to revisit the discovery problem, this time, applying tools like Olive’s Dynamic Book (ODB) application where content can be placed directly inside the pages and platforms where prospective customers are spending all their time.

Here’s how search will evolve and become more powerful

You’re probably pretty happy with Google search today, right? It’s incredibly fast, extremely reliable and almost always delivers the desired results. What more could you ask for?

I think the problem with today’s search solutions is that we’ve limited them to what’s online. If the content has a web address and it’s been crawled by the major engines it’s properly analyzed and presented in search results.

But what about everything else? Once again, Evernote is a terrific example of what could be.

I’m a huge Evernote fan and I’ve configured it so that all my notes are exposed and retrievable in a Google search. Alongside the standard web, news, maps, images, etc., search results categories, Google also shows a frame with Evernote’s Web Clipper results. Simply put, a single Google search produces results from the web as well as my Evernote archive. Simple, yet powerful.

Why does it have to stop with the web and Evernote? Why can’t one search be configured to retrieve results from all my content streams?

Let’s start with the documents on my computer and in the cloud. They’re mostly Office applications, so a search needs to understand the structure of Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents. I’m not talking about simply searching file names; this search functionality needs to know whether the phrase is buried in the document itself.

Don’t forget about Outlook and all the other email applications. Search needs to sift through everything in my inbox, folders and attachments.

How about all the digital books, newspapers and magazines I read or scan every week? My search tool needs to capture, index and report back on all that activity as well. I sometimes rate articles and books I read, so the search algorithm needs to understand those rankings and include them in its algorithm, pushing higher-rated results towards the top.

Let’s also not forget about websites I’ve visited. This search tool should understand which sites I frequently visit and which pages I’ve spent more time on, reflecting the fact that I’m reading rather than scanning. This too is critical information for the search algorithm.

Next, it needs to understand my social graph and factor that into the search results. I’m much more active on Twitter than Facebook, for example, so what are the most recent relevant tweets that belong in my search results?

I realize this starts to clutter the results page. That’s why it all has to be configurable by the user. Clicking on/off checkboxes in a list should allow me to show or hide the various sources in search results. 

I’m able to search each of these sources individually today, of course, but there’s no uber-search tool allowing me to consolidate and search across all sources with one query.

Finally, and here’s where it gets even more interesting, I want the ability to curate and share my search results. Today you can do this by sharing the url from the results page; for example, here’s a Google search for my employer, Olive Software. That’s a start, but now I want to insert links to other sources, including all the ones noted above (e.g., documents, emails, ebooks, etc.).

Yes, there are countless sharing, opt-in, privacy and copyright issues to navigate before this vision becomes a reality. But imagine how powerful the results will be when these capabilities become standard features in every search engine.