Extracting Book Data from Library Information Systems
Despite increasingly sophisticated library automation, the data on books in libraries is often hard to come by.
Researching Amazon and Libraries
Announcing a research project to study how many academic books Amazon sells to libraries.
Some Practical Steps toward D2C Marketing
Although there are clear benefits to being a large publisher to engage in D2C sales, there are practical steps that even the smallest publishers can take. Here is a summary of some options.
How to Shoot the Moon with D2C Sales
In order to build direct-to-consumer sales, university presses should consider streamlining their publishing programs and focus on a small number of subject areas, even just a single area.
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?
Inadvertent Innovation
While we usually think of innovators as visionaries with big ideas that challenge the very assumptions of the way we conduct our lives, many innovations seem to happen almost by accident. The challenge is how to make these accidents occur more often and to benefit from them.
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.
Stage Five Book Publishing: A Guide for University Presses
The five stages of book publishing outlined here describe the arc as publishers move from the traditional model (where print books were sold mostly in bookstores and to libraries) through a range of developments using online media, culminating in new forms of subscription marketing.
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.
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.