Extracting Book Data from Library Information Systems
Despite increasingly sophisticated library automation, the data on books in libraries is often hard to come by.
Good Data, Bad Data, You Know I’ve Had My Share: Library Book Acquisition Patterns
We have had assumptions about the academic book market that probably are just not true.
More Consolidation in the Publishing Business
Rakuten, the owner of Kobo, has acquired OverDrive, a leading library ebook vendor. The implications of this deal will ripple through the industry and require many players to reevaluate their strategies.
Researching Amazon and Libraries
Announcing a research project to study how many academic books Amazon sells to libraries.
Why Do Publishers Want to Sell Direct?
University presses cite a number of reasons to sell books directly to end-users. The principal reason is to establish a relationship with the customer. But once that relationship has been initiated, what business purpose does it serve?
Who Can Rival Amazon?
Amazon is now the most important participant in the business of scholarly books, but it faces few threats. This post hypothesizes about where challenges to Amazon could come from.
What Scholarly Publishers Can Learn from Bookish
Bookish is a new online bookstore and discovery service. It is a joint venture of three publishers and presents a useful model for what scholarly publishers could do in building their own online bookstore.
Talking to the End-User — A Publishing Paradigm
Publishers can and should explore strategies that are built around users, which is a kind of D2C marketing. However, working on a direct basis has its costs and may make us all appreciate all the efficiencies that intermediaries provide.
Hawking Radiation: Figuring Out How Many Books Are Sold to Libraries
An odd circumstance of the book business is that no one really knows which books are sold to libraries and how important libraries are to overall book sales. At the heart of the problem is the fact that Amazon, which sells books to libraries, does not share any sales data. This post suggests a couple ways to get at that data in the face of Amazon’s obstinacy.