Repost: Book Buyers in all the Strange Places

Originally posted on February 25, 2007:

A few weeks ago Mrs PND and I were watching The Daily Show-- and I thought this show and The Colbert Report, which follows it, are really serious about books. And not your run-of-the- mill titles, but some with real meat. Recent authors on the shows have included Ralph Nader, John Danforth, Jimmy Carter and Ishmael Beah. It is curious that the last title seems to have generated some media attention on a number of fronts. Firstly, it was the second title that Starbucks has selected to 'showcase' in its stores (following Mitch Albom's recent book). Recent sales figures indicate that sales through Starbucks are smoking the traditional sales channels of B&N and Borders. Fellow traveller Eoin Purcell noted the reports from Galleycat and wondered several things about the market for these books sold via Starbucks and whether publishers are doing something wrong. In my mind, Starbucks moving so many units has more to do with the power of the Starbucks brand but it could also reflect a deficiency in publishers' marketing philosophy, as I noted in my comments on his blog:

In my mind there is a distinct correlation between a Starbucks selection and an Oprah selection and it doesn’t surprise me that Beah’s book and the Albom title are doing well at Starbucks. The reason I think there is a correlation is that the Starbucks and Oprah brands are so strong we well may trust them to recommend anything (probably some limits!). Certainly there are some other factors at play - no other titles, spur of the moment purchasing, what have you - but I think we believe that the title is available at Starbucks because they have taken the time - like Oprah and Richard and Judy - to select the very best title that they believe their customers will like and value. Five or six years ago, no one would have predicted that Oprah would be able to move so many books and it took the industry by surprise. The point for publishers is that there are ‘influencers’ that captivate the media (and thereby consumers) that publishers need to identify, nurture and exploit. I think it will be the canny publisher that actually starts to build a list specifically of interest to an ‘influencer’ so that this person (or brand) can support and promote the titles as Starbucks or Oprah does. For example, what if Macmillan launched a Starbucks imprint to sell titles (out of every outlet) that were selected and ‘vetted’ by the Starbucks team. The books would be available everywhere else but, at Starbucks, the consumer would associate their warm fuzzy feeling about the brand to the product extension--the books.

I do think that success in non-traditional outlets seems to catch publishers off-guard. A few months ago, the NYT wrote about books sold at weird, non-bookstore outlets such as butcher shops and clothes stores. Many in the industry derided the article because, as 'insiders', we thought the NYT was being disingenuous about something publishers already know. But do they?

Today's article in the Times discusses the book program on Comedy Central and it strongly suggests that the success of the program is an accident - at least to the publishers. Perhaps this is the manner in which the article is written; however, it appears that weighty titles are ending up on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report because the traditional outlets utilized by publishers don't work as well as they used to. Thus by default. What is unsaid is that publishers don't really understand their market. The relationship between The Daily Show audience and a publisher's target consumer should be easy to determine. Yet, despite the fact that The Daily Show has been on for 10 years, we are supposed to be surprised at the bump Beah's book received after appearing on the show two weeks ago.

Publishers say that particularly for the last six months, “The Daily Show” and its spin off, “The Colbert Report,” which has on similarly wonky authors, like the former White House official David Kuo, have become the most reliable venues for promoting weighty books whose authors would otherwise end up on “The Early Show” on CBS looking like they showed up at the wrong party.

Perhaps twenty years ago, Rolling Stone magazine ran an ad campaign that showed a hippie tricked-out VW van with weird colors and stickers with a recent Merc or BMW next to it. The ad was headed "Perception and Reality "and was meant to show that the readers of RS were not the hippies of old, but rich yuppies. To some extent, there may be some of this going on here when the publishers say,

Part of the surprise, publishers said, is that the Comedy Central audience is more serious than its reputation allows. The public may still think of the “Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” audience as a group of sardonic slackers, Gen-Y college students who prefer YouTube to print. But publishers say it’s a much more diverse demographic — and, more important, a book-buying audience.

There are more book buyers out there and perhaps if publishers spent more time understanding how 'influencers' manage our information flows they wouldn't be taken by surprise. As we know, 'influencers' can be butchers as much as they can be news readers.

The Times isn't necessarily a completely viable messenger and I believe their perceptions are off-kilter to some degree, as they reflect on the subject matter and refer to it as 'fake-news'. Objectively, The Daily Show is not 'fake-news'; it is ironic, funny and sometimes brutally honest news, but it is news nonetheless. I expect they wouldn't suggest that the NBC news is 'real news' just because it is dull and humourless.

It all comes down to knowing your audience. That is the Starbucks way and should be what publishers need to do more of.

How Students Use of Information in the Digital Age

New report from the University of Washington using a grant from the Macarthur Foundation on how college students evaluate and use information in the digital age. The summary of the findings are as follows:

All in all, the findings suggest students in both large universities and small colleges use a risk averse strategy based on efficiency and predictability in order to manage and control the information available to them on campuses. Still, most students struggle with the same frustrating open-endedness when trying to find information and conduct research for college courses and to a far lesser extent, for solving an information problem in their personal lives.

Major findings are as follows:
1. Students in the sample took little at face value and reported they were frequent
evaluators of information culled from the Web and to a lesser extent, the campus library.

More often than anything else, respondents considered whether information was up-to date and current when evaluating Web content (77%) and library materials (67%) for course work.

2. Evaluating information was often a collaborative process—almost two-thirds of the
respondents (61%) reportedly turned to friends and/or family members when they
needed help and advice with sorting through and evaluating information for personal use. Nearly half of the students in the sample (49%) frequently asked instructors for assistance with assessing the quality of sources for course work—far fewer
asked librarians (11%) for assistance.

3. The majority of the sample used routines for completing one research assignment to the next, including writing a thesis statement (58%), adding personal perspective to papers (55%), and developing a working outline (51%). Many techniques were
learned in high school and ported to college, according to students we interviewed.

4. Despite their reputation of being avid computer users who are fluent with new
technologies, few students in our sample had used a growing number of Web 2.0
applications within the past six months for collaborating on course research assignments and/or managing research tasks.

5. For over three-fourths (84%) of the students surveyed, the most difficult step of the course-related research process was getting started. Defining a topic (66%), narrowing it down (62%), and filtering through irrelevant results (61%) frequently hampered students in the sample, too. Follow-up interviews suggest students lacked the research acumen for framing an inquiry in the digital age where information abounds and intellectual discovery was paradoxically overwhelming for them.

6. Comparatively, students reported having far fewer problems finding information for personal use, though sorting through results for solving an information problem in their daily lives hamstrung more than a third of the students in the sample (41%).

7. Unsurprisingly, what mattered most to students while they were working on course related research assignments was passing the course (99%), finishing the assignment (97%), and getting a good grade (97%). Yet, three-quarters of the sample also reported they considered carrying out comprehensive research of a topic (78%) and learning something new (78%) of importance to them, too.

Our analysis shows robust relationships and similarities among variables from our sample of students at 25 educational institutions in the U.S. However, these findings should not be viewed as comprehensive, but as another part of our ongoing research.
While additional research is warranted in order to confirm whether or not our conclusions may be generalized to the nationwide college and university population, the size of our sample and consistent patterns of responses do lend credibility to our findings.

In the following pages, we present detailed findings from our analysis in three parts:

Part One: A comparative analysis of how students find information and prioritize their use of information sources, based on survey data from last year (2009) and this yearʼs survey (2010).

Part Two: Findings about how students evaluate information they find on the Web and through the library for course work and personal use. In addition, findings about how students use routine techniques for completing for course-related research assignments, including their use of Web 2.0 applications.

Part Three: Findings about the difficulties, challenges, and obstacles students frequently encounter during the entire research process—from start to finish—for course work and for personal use.

Over America: Mt Hood

Mt Hood, 1973

A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.

In the family archive there is a batch of 100 duplicate images. Dupes are rarely marked with a month and year as processed images normally are so for this particular batch of images I have no idea what the date was. I am guessing 1973 but there are few if any markers in the set to make a definite declaration. There are many from the air photos and most of these are unidentifiable as is this image on the left. I am guessing Mt Hood. It is from the Pacific North West since there are some images of Seattle Tacoma airport in the set. Again, as is the case with numerous archive photos that I had no hand in, less than 10 years later I ended up going to school in this area. If you can identify these images let me know.

Join me on Flickr

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 46): Hay-on-Wye, Commercial Libraries, Bush Critics, Random House Film & Words.

The Telegraph will partner with the Hay-on-Wye book festival for the next three years (Telegraph):

Over the next three years, in these pages and throughout the Telegraph, you’ll be able to enjoy writers and thinkers of this calibre, and experience some of what the organisers of Hay have put on for those who have visited since it began. When I suggest to Florence that he is immune to the old parlour game about fantasy dinner guests because he’s had his fantasy several times over, he replies: “Yes, except it’s not dinner, it’s a picnic.” The green fields of Hay are “great levellers”, he says. The Hay organisers operate in the belief that a child who lives on the border between Herefordshire and Powys is entitled to the same world-class entertainment as a child who lives in Hampstead and attends Westminster School. And locals are now, he says, blasé to the point of comedy about celebrity. Twenty years ago, one writer Florence had invited to Hay turned him down, on the grounds that his project was implausible – literature in Britain, the author replied, was simply not good enough to sustain a 10-day festival. Now Hay welcomes not just hundreds of thousands of people over 10 days in May, but hundreds of thousands more across the globe, trading in intellectual dynamism and productive mischief. Hay’s expansion internationally is both an important part of its future and entirely in keeping with its founding concerns. It’s a way, Florence says, of “finding out about the world through its writers”. The guiding spirit of the festivals has always been, he adds, “scepticism, inquiry, going beyond what you’re told. Think again. Look twice.” Nothing, we feel, could better match the perceptiveness and curiosity of Telegraph readers.

The Chronicle Review has a thought provoking article on the commercialization of libraries (Chron):

Libraries have already drifted too far down the commercial path: Research and educational values must be restored to their primacy of place. "Good enough" and one-stop shopping are no substitutes for systematic research. Technology cannot replace human expertise. The business world has many valuable tools and resources to offer, but libraries must insist that scholarly requirements take precedence over commercial interests. The need to realign library values is especially urgent in the realm of monographs. Electronic publishing of academic monographs is still at an early stage, but it is growing fast. As it is developing, e-monographic publishing is following the path of e-journals and will, therefore, reproduce many of the same problems—spiraling prices, homogeneous collections, greater numbers of low-quality monographs. Libraries will provide access to titles owned by the publishers, who will offer them up in preset packages accompanied by complex licensing agreements that constrain their use. (Existing e-book licenses, for example, generally prohibit interlibrary loans.)

And what about the Bush book from several UK perspectives (Independent):

Tony Blair: 'Some of our allies wavered. Tony Blair never did'Seven years after the invasion of Iraq, George Bush and Tony Blair remained joined at the hip. Sorry is the hardest word for both of them. The former US president seems to have studied the former prime minister's appearance before the Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq in January. A headline flashed danger signals in Mr Blair's mind as he was asked whether he had any regrets. He did not want the headline to be "Blair apologises for war" or "Blair finally says sorry." So he said merely that he took responsibility for his actions. Mr Bush has been through the same thought process. "I mean, apologising would basically say the decision was a wrong decision," Mr Bush told NBC. "And I don't believe it was the wrong decision." Unlike his soulmate, Mr Bush does not do emotion. In his own memoirs, Mr Blair pleads for understanding from his critics, saying: "Do they really suppose I don't care, don't feel, don't regret with every fibre of my being the loss of those who died?" In contrast, Mr Bush says: "It doesn't matter how people perceive me in England. It just doesn't matter any more. And frankly, at times, it didn't matter then." Mr Blair was ready to ignore political opinion. Mr Bush offered Mr Blair a last-minute opt-out from the Iraq invasion when he realised it could bring his closest foreign ally down, saying he wanted regime change in Baghdad, not London.Revealingly, Mr Blair replied: "I'm in. If it costs the Government, fine." That unquestioning loyalty might have surprised some observers at the time. But Mr Bush already felt he had a sense of his British ally's character. It was a judgement he had come to on Mr Blair's first visit to the US president's Crawford ranch in 2001."There was no stiffness about Tony and Cherie," he writes. "After dinner, we decided to watch a movie. When they agreed on Meet the Parents, a comedy starring Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller, Laura and I knew the Bushes and Blairs would get along."Andrew Grice, Political Editor

Random House have launched a web site dedicated to movies and television made from their books (Word & Film) From the twitter this week (@personanondata) Elsevier Releases Image Search; New SciVerse ScienceDirect Feature Enables Researchers to Quickly Find Visual content. Press Release The Australian: Local publishers invited to Apple's iBookstore. Telegraph: Pearson to double number of language schools in China. paidContent: Why Publishers Are Tracking The Costco v. Omega Supreme Court Case MediaPost: NY Appeals Court Reinstates Amazon Sales Tax Suit 11/09/2010

Repost: The Beatles Bookstore and Reference Collections

Originally posted on January 19, 2010.


I may have the best collection of Beatles books for sale on Amazon. How? I recently read The Beatles, The Biography by Bob Spitz and in the back of the book were eight pages of bibliographic references. As I looked through these it occurred to me that all the work 'behind the book' is essentially hidden to the reader; more importantly this 'extra' content represents un-monetized revenue to the publisher. As more non-fiction titles are available on the web and as publishers attempt to build direct relationships with readers it would seem obvious that adding the 'raw' content that went into the creation of the work - all of which represents real, tangible material and research - could be made available to the consumer as a package of content. Let the consumer decide if they want to read only the finished book or delve into the primary research material.

At BookExpo last year, a publisher from a major house lamented a friend who had spent 10 years writing some social history book and dammed if they didn't have a right to sell the book for $35. It struck me the reader doesn't really care it took ten years of the authors life; it's always about value proposition, and because consumers are barraged with free content the $35 often doesn't appear reasonable. On the other hand, if the reader had access to a 'reference' collection of material that was effectively curated by the author and expansive beyond the traditional book suddenly the value proposition of that social history begins to justify a price differential between the basic book (at $9.95 for sake of argument) and a companion web based reference collection at $35.

Getting back to The Beatles and my bookstore. I took all the citations and added them to my Amazon bookstore and there they reside as a dedicated Beatles bookstore. (I haven't sold much). This really isn't close to representing the true potential value that a web based reference collection of The Beatles could represent, yet Spitz did the work: He took the notes, watched the videos, interviewed the people, read the books, etc. etc. This material is index-able, with a little bit of foresight the writing/editing process could support more efficient collection of the bibliographic material and collectively the material could be monetized. As a 'reference collection' the book then becomes a living thing, because as new material about the Beatles is written or material is written about The Beatles, The Biography by reviewers and readers, all additional material can be added to the 'reference collection' thus keeping the book relevant. Accordingly, developing additional (web) content around a book in this manner starts to challenge the idea of front and back list.

If the publisher doesn't want to invest the time and effort in developing their content in this manner then I am sure third parties would be interested in licensing the rights to take the authors primary material, marry it with the finished product and create a web reference collection as I described. Last year I read a biography of Sir Charles Wren, the architect of post-Great Fire London. I know London fairly well, but I had a devil of a time locating and visualizing all the buildings discussed in the book: Just think of all the city plans, architectural diagrams and 3d models that this book could support. An end product maybe not for everyone but enough that the 'premium' $35 price looks viable.

Yankee Book and Ebook library launch combined print and eBook acquisition work flow.

From their press release:

YBP Library Services, a Baker & Taylor company, and Ebook Library (EBL) announce the launch of the first comprehensive demand-driven workflow for print and e-book acquisition. The two companies will combine the book-in-hand descriptions and preferences from YBP's approval process with EBL's flexible real-time On Demand acquisition service, offering a robust just-in-time approach to delivering e-books and print books.

"Demand-driven acquisitions are a new way of helping our library customers to better serve their patrons," said Mark Kendall, Senior Vice President of Sales for YBP. "This partnership with EBL is a groundbreaking effort to add value."

EBL is a division of Ebooks Corporation Limited, an Australian public company with additional distribution channels that include ebooks.com (www.ebooks.com), the leading dedicated ebook retail site, and Ebook Services for publishers (http://www.ebookscorp.com/publishers.html). EBL's multi-user and demand-driven access models have been widely adopted by libraries around the world. EBL's ever-expanding catalogue currently offers over 150,000 titles from over more than 400 international publishers in a vast range of academic and professional subject areas.

This new service will enable libraries to use YBP's approval profiling methodologies to automatically designate new books as DDA (demand-driven acquisition), rather than receive the titles as an automatic book or as a slip. Titles designated as DDA will automatically be made available for patron-driven selection in EBL's On Demand platform. The initial launch of the DDA-Approval workflow will be available for e-books and then will be extended to incorporate print books from select publishers. The service will gradually incorporate an increasing percentage of the books YBP handles on approval.

"We are very pleased to enhance our On Demand service with YBP's outstanding approval plan tools and to add print books alongside e-books to our platform," said Kari Paulson, President of EBL. "EBL has been working for many years to provide innovative demand-driven acquisition services, and we believe the work we are doing with YBP is a step toward delivering the next generation of tools for providing a streamlined, end-to-end service for our libraries."

Books about Presidents

These USA Today snapshots were the best and most effective marketing and PR we did at Bowker when I was there. We got more mileage out of these than anything else we did. At the time it was Andrew Grabois who did the stats and this time it is Roy Crego.