Back to home.

What the iPad Told Me

Category: Bookselling, Metadata

So. The Unicorn has arrived and everyone is busily playing. Apart from all the pros and cons – which are really noisy – what this means is that we have yet another way to search for and access books.

Anyone who doubts that most readers are searching for their next good book online is not paying attention. Review publications are shuttering. The Sunday book review section in your local paper – seen it lately? if I’m wrong, but I believe the New York Times Book Review is pretty much the only big consumer review still published on paper. (Except for industry-specific publications like Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, which – as we know – are going through struggles of their own.) And of course all of these have websites and license their reviews to e-commerce engines.

So how do people find out about good books?

If they’re interested in trade books – fiction, genre books – they probably go to Amazon or B&N.com. They read the customer reviews. They also go to blogs – Dear Author, Smart Bitches.

If they’re interested in specific subjects – cooking, history, biography – they probably Google what they’re interested in (“Indian cooking”), and link out from those search results.

Online discovery has become the new book review.

Which poses a new set of challenges to publishers. How do you get your books to come up first in a search? How do you reach the right bloggers and get effective reviews out there? To many publishers who are grappling with this, it all looks like a crapshoot. And several small publishers I know have simply thrown up their hands rather than tried to understand the way readers are now looking for books (and consuming them).

Search is not easy to understand. Most of us type something into the Google box, and expect that what comes up will be appropriate, correct, the best resources out there on the subject. Librarians will tell you that this is a fallacy – there are plenty of things Google doesn’t pick up. Just because a searcher doesn’t find it, doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Much of that “findability” (and I know I beat this drum a lot, but it still, apparently, needs beating) has to do with a book’s metadata. Not simply title and author, but the BISAC codes, the description, the table of contents – anything that describes what the book is about. If a publisher is not paying attention to metadata, it will be much harder for readers to find that publisher’s books.

Another aspect of “findability” is how many times that book is mentioned on the web. Which means…bloggers. As a publisher, you want your books to be reviewed as often as possible on the web. So a crucial strategy for any publicity department is to create a roster of bloggers and get them review copies (many prefer these to be digital).

There are some fantastic tools out there for publishers trying to pinpoint bloggers – NetGalley is a great one. And a brand-new effort (by Brett Sandusky of Kaplan and Rebecca the Book Lady) just launched yesterday: an anonymous survey of bloggers which will cycle back to publishers and help them strategize their publicity approaches.

Regardless of the iPad’s hype, it is the latest of many horses to leave the barn (trains to leave station, cats to jump out of bag, genies to come out of bottle). Consumption is increasingly digital. Discovery is almost wholly digital. Publishers need to recognize this, understand it, and figure out how to make it work for them.

Bookmark this post:

Posted by Laura Dawson, 8:19 pm, Comments (2), permalink

Metadata! More Important Than Ever!

Category: E-commerce, Metadata

My passion for metadata isn’t a big secret – since my days at Muze and B&N.com, I’ve witnessed firsthand how good metadata helps people find the books they are looking for, and how bad metadata prevents people from finding what they want.

Why is this relevant now?

Well, CES showed us that there is a great interest in ebook readers – 23 of them debuted there, and an entire “Ebook Zone” was created. Apple is negotiating with publishers to sell content (books, magazines, newspapers) on its soon-to-appear tablet. With all these digitized books, search becomes more crucial than ever – web search is the ONLY way people are going to purchase these digital products.

Discovery/review services like NetGalley – as well as all the ecommerce sites – are heavily reliant on metadata not just for listing titles, but also for search algorithms themselves. (You’d think that would go without saying, but it doesn’t.)

Whether it’s “semantic” search or a more traditional browsing hierarchy, search technologies rest on metadata. Tags, definitions, clarifications (“when we say ‘porcelain’ we mean fine china, not toilets”) are all necessary to guide users to the information they want.

This metadata may not come in the form of the traditional ONIX feed. If a book file is marked up in XML (whether via InDesign or anything else), the title, author, BISAC and LC subject codes, price, publisher, and copyright date can all be easily derived from that book file – because those data points are defined in the file (usually in the front matter) with tags.

But just as with ONIX, what’s inside those tags has to be correct. This has a better shot at happening if the search engine is pulling from the book itself (the author name, for example, is not likely to be misspelled in the actual book).

In recently-released recommendations to the publishing industry, BIC has stated: "Publishers must retain responsibility, wherever possible and appropriate, for the metadata of the products they publish, in all formats, print and digital." Another company, Giant Chair has built its entire business around hosting a metadata platform for publishers: “When equipped with the appropriate tools, publishers are naturally the most qualified and motivated source for metadata creation and enrichment.”

Which makes sense!

Except in the real world it doesn’t quite play out that way. In my career, I’ve seen lots of publisher-generated metadata. There’s a reason why NetRead, Eloquence, and other data-scrubbing services exist. There’s a reason why Ingram, Bowker, and Baker & Taylor have departments of data editors who normalize and standardize that data. There’s a reason why librarians spend countless hours re-cataloguing titles for WorldCat. There’s a reason why BISG launched its Product Data Certification Program.

And that reason is: while publishers make the books, they continue not to pay sufficient attention to the accuracy of their data. While publishers are the definitive source of who the author is, what the list price is, what the book is about…they are not recording a lot of that information accurately. Because if they were, Fran Toolan and Greg Aden would have to find new things to do. Richard Stark would suddenly find himself with weeks and weeks of free time. Thousands of library cataloguers would be out of work. Ingram, Bowker, and B&T databases would be redundant. PDCP would not be necessary.

But good metadata IS publishers’ responsibility, fundamentally. They can outsource that responsibility, but ultimately it does all come back to the publishers. As our digital landscape explodes – as web search becomes not just one way but THE way readers find what’s next on their reading lists – metadata only becomes more important. If your sales are dipping, it’s entirely possible that readers can’t find your books. Take a look at your data. The solution is probably there.

Bookmark this post:

Posted by Laura Dawson, 8:46 pm, Comments (1), permalink

ISBNs and ebooks: Part 7624

Category: Bookselling, Digital Publishing, E-commerce, Metadata

Yesterday the AAP’s Digital Working Group hosted a meeting where Phil Madans of Hachette, Angela Bole of BISG, and I talked about ISBNs and identifying digital content. This came on the heels of Mark Bide’s webinar for BISG yesterday on the same subject.

We broke the topic down into three discrete parts: ISBNs and ebooks, ISBNs and chapters, and ISBNs and "chunks". I stopped the presentation after each slide so we could discuss each part before moving on to the next one. And some interesting findings emerged.

Metadata

The primary objection (even more than cost – but of course these were larger publishers who can buy identifiers in bulk at a discount) to assigning an ISBN to each format of ebook is having to track the metadata on each record. Databases begin to bloat with products that are identical except for format, and managing the metadata becomes both repetitive and confusing.

Furthermore, it became apparent that publishers are not particularly using ISBNs to track royalties and sales – they are using SEVERAL fields, and the ISBN is not even necessarily the most important among them. So the ISBN International Agency’s argument that the ISBN is an essential tool for tracking these things falls by the wayside.

We talked a bit about the prospect of third parties assigning ISBNs to different ebook formats – most publishers seem to just want to produce an EPUB file, assign an ISBN to that one, and then send it "into the wild" (as Bide says) for conversion and distribution. The distributors and retailers are primarily book-related and their databases are generally keyed off an ISBN, so those third parties would have to assign ISBNs to whatever formats they are distributing and selling. But the publishers at this meeting did not seem particularly worried about that prospect.

One publisher also stressed that by supporting more than one format, they’re contributing to format proliferation and they would prefer very much not to do that.

However, the downside to allowing third parties to assign ISBNs to digital products on an as-needed basis becomes problematic when there are changes to the metadata. If a pub date shifts, if a price goes up, if there are corrections to author names, additions to synopses and reviews – any time you have to edit the metadata on a title, if you’ve got third parties with their OWN editions of that title, you can’t be sure the edited/corrected metadata will reach those editions.

ISBNs and Chapters

Even less popular than the one-ISBN-per-format model is the one-ISBN-per-chapter idea. This expands the metadata bloat exponentially. At present, most publishers who are offering chapters for sale are doing so from their own websites, so ISBNs are not such an issue. However, once retailers begin offering individual chapters of books, the industry will face the same problems it does with different ebook formats. Multiplied by however many chapters are in a given book.

In addition to identification of chapters for the purposes of trading with third parties, there is the issue of tracking royalties. With textbook authors, this is problematic – many authors contribute to textbooks, and determining who wrote which chapters can be daunting. It was generally agreed that without significant market demand, identifying chapters for the purposes of trade is not a high priority.

ISBNs and "Chunks"

First there was the objection to the term "chunks". Which I agree with! It’s nasty. But Anna Wintour said the same thing about the word "blog"…and look where that got her! It seems "chunk" is the term we’re stuck with, and I am heartily sorry about that.

Second, everyone at the meeting pretty much agreed that this is a vastly esoteric subject and not likely to become a pressing issue anytime soon. Even Amazon does not sell sub-chapter-level content. Licensing content to third parties (such as websites) will likely mean putting together discrete digital assets into various packages, but there seems to be no trade reason right now for ISBNs to be attached to those packages. This may change as the market changes.

We ended with a "watch this space" message, and are now putting together a survey which looks at some of the assumptions behind past ISBN-use recommendations.

Bookmark this post:

Posted by Laura Dawson, 1:26 pm, Comments (0), permalink

BISG/BIC White Paper on identifiers

Category: Bookselling, Digital Libraries, Digital Publishing, E-commerce, Libraries, Metadata, Publishing

BISG/BIC has commissioned Michael Holdsworth, formerly managing director of Cambridge University Press, to write a white paper on identifying digital content. It’s out, available, posted:

The Identification of Digital Book Content is intended to stimulate debate in the book industry about how digital book content should be identified and to encourage further work on the development and implementation of identification standards and best practices for such content.

I’ve read the paper – it’s really good and should indeed spark a lot of discussion. We’ll be covering it in Identifier Committee meetings at BISAC – those who are interested should go to the BISG website and sign up for that committee. We’ll be sending around a new meeting time soon (having it after the BISAC General meetings hasn’t been too inspiring, frankly).

Bookmark this post:

Posted by Laura Dawson, 11:18 am, Comments (0), permalink

More Muzing

Category: Company News, E-commerce, Metadata

Don Henderson left me a comment yesterday (my comments indicator isn’t working properly for some reason, so it looks like there are 0 comments for that post, when in fact if you click on "comments" you’ll see his post). He very justly corrects me – it’s LEE Ho who’s the VP of marketing over at Muze…JEFF Ho works in marketing at McGraw-Hill and I got them confused.

At any rate, Don goes on to say "There are plenty of Muze personnel left". Indeed! But my question is…how much experience do they have in the particular market Muze addresses? How much institutional knowledge is left when so many of the folks who have been with the company for years have now left? What’s to prevent Muze from making the same mistakes over and over again when that institutional knowledge is no longer there?

Since I left in November 2006, the company has been gutted. I’m sure many wonderful people have come in to replace those who have left or been laid off, but that kind of turnover has a profound effect on a place. It’s not a question of moving bodies and minds around – when turnover is that high, there’s a sacrifice in the organic growth and cohesion of a company. And I wonder if Muze can make up for that.

Muze has amazed me before. It began in 1990 (or thereabouts) in a warehouse in Williamsburg. I came on board in 1995, at the tail end of the warehouse phase – wires and cables draped from ceiling to floor; running the copy machine too long would blow a fuse that would take out the entire video department; it was a bizarre combination of old and new that was right out of a Terry Gilliam movie. In that environment, we played and learned and developed amazing applications. Moving to Soho in 1996, the Skunkworks mindset continued. It was a place of extraordinary inventiveness.

And yet…it wasn’t sustainable. Through massive mismanagement, Muze lost several dozen people, many of whom flocked to Barnes & Noble.com. (I was one of them – I went in 1998.) The mismanagement continued – we’d hear things about one disasterous CEO after another. When I returned in 2006, it seemed that things had stabilized…but this was deceptive, obviously.

No one running the company has ever known quite what to do with it. It is such a promising enterprise – and it attracts extremely gifted people – but every single CEO it’s had has wanted to turn it into something it isn’t. This last round…turning it into a company that distributes actual content instead of simply catalog metadata and sound samples…was particularly ill-thought-out. Acquiring the Loudeye assets was a mistake. It diverted the company from its core business. Muze, I think, is not a company to be transformed. It’s a company that needs to make the best of what it’s got – and it’s got quite a lot.

I’m interested in what Peter Krause and Paul Parreira at Tactic Company are going to do - I believe they have taken the best in what Muze has to offer (editorial and data creation) and are making a business of it.

Bookmark this post:

Posted by Laura Dawson, 9:27 am, Comments (0), permalink

How Can They Have A Layoff If There’s No One Left At The Company?

Category: Company News, Digital Publishing, E-commerce, Metadata

Just in time for Christmas, Muze has laid off an undisclosed number of staffers from its Seattle office. John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer apparently got a tip that 75% of the Seattle contingent was let go, but the new VP of marketing, Jeff Ho, disputes this:

"It is not that big of a cut," said Ho, who declined to disclose the number of employees at the company….Ho said the company is "right sizing" the digital media delivery group, which is based in Seattle.

Ho added (rather ominously) that in terms of severance packages, the laid-off employees were "taken care of". When Muze laid me off (at Thanksgiving of last year), I was taken care of, too – with a whole two weeks’ severance.

Predicting that Muze strips the company of its assets and sells them off, and folds like a Japanese fan.

Bookmark this post:

Posted by Laura Dawson, 10:26 am, Comments (1), permalink

More Muzers

Category: Company News, E-commerce, Metadata

In an attempt to counter the torrent of departing Muze personnel, two executives have been added to the team in New York: Joslyn Lane, Managing Editor of Media Information (replacing Paul Parreira and Peter Krause), and Lee Ho, VP of Marketing (replacing someone whose name I forget because he wasn’t there long enough for it to stick).

Meanwhile, Mike Pegan, former director of sales for Muze, is now back at AMG.

Bookmark this post:

Posted by Laura Dawson, 9:53 am, Comments (0), permalink

Harvard Coop: ISBNs are our intellectual property

Category: Bookselling, Metadata

In what must be one of the most incredible arguments in the world of book data, the Harvard Coop has been punting students out of its store for jotting down ISBNs and pricing information (in an attempt to do an online search to see if they can find the books cheaper elsewhere) – on the premise that the ISBNs are the bookstore’s intellectual property and the students are thus violating copyright law by taking them down.

Here’s the real deal, in case anyone is wondering:

If an ISBN is anyone’s property, it’s the publisher’s property. The publisher bought and paid for the ISBN. The Coop is way out of line on this one. What those students are doing is completely legal. The only way the Coop could justifiably kick students out of the store is if they have a policy stating that comparison shopping is not permitted in the store.

This situation, however, adds fuel to the textbook-pricing-is-out-of-control fire – and furthers our own argument that digital textbooks are pretty much the only way costs are going to come down on textbooks, and that libraries will be playing an increasing role in textbook distribution just as they do with scholarly journal distribution. For more on this, see the latest issue of The Big Picture, or download our white paper, "What Publishers Should Know About Libraries."

Bookmark this post:

Posted by Laura Dawson, 8:54 am, Comments (0), permalink

IDPF approves Open Publication Structure 2.0

Category: Digital Publishing, Metadata

The members of the IDPF have approved the Open Publication Standard v. 2.0, according to Publishers Weekly:

The IDPF adoption of OPS 2.0 along with the ".epub" file format that goes with it (the OPS 2.0 standard uses the .epub file extension for reflowable text) means that publishers can now create one digital book file instead of the 6 to10 formats previously required….The new standard also means interoperability for ebooks with consumers now being able to read non-DRM digital books on any software or device that uses the .epub standard.

Woo-hoo! So now you can download MobiPocket ebooks to read on your Sony Reader, right?

Bookmark this post:

Posted by Laura Dawson, 8:22 am, Comments (0), permalink

The Big Picture – nterview with Steve Potash, CEO Overdrive-Digital Library Reserve

Category: Bookselling, Digital Libraries, E-commerce, Libraries, Metadata, The Big Picture

In this issue of The Big Picture:

THE DOWNLOAD: – by industry consultant Laura Dawson
INTERVIEW: – Steve Potash – CEO of Overdrive-Digital Library Reserve
TIA – THIS ISSUE’S ACRONYM – EAN
INTEL: COMPANIES – Overdrive teams up with Navy General Library
INTEL: PRODUCTS – Google Custom Search Business Edition launched
INTEL: PEOPLE – Former Muzers join MyStrands
THE JOB EXCHANGE – Visit the new LJNDawson.com on-site job board!

From The Download:
"I recently did a consulting gig for an e-commerce website whose database was about 10 years old. Essentially, we scrapped the old database and built a new one – which involved some very careful, step-by-step cleansing of their metadata before plugging it into the new structure. Titles, author names, subject classifications – all had to be gone over with a fine-tooth comb in an Excel spreadsheet.

Not the sexiest gig in the world, and I believe the lead developer (and he’ll confirm this for me, I’m sure) was bored out of his mind with that process. But immediately upon pumping the cleaned data to the website, customers wrote in to say they could find products more easily. (I was shocked, frankly, that customers would take the time to do this – you’re supposed to be able to find things; that customers don’t take this for granted while shopping online just tells me how bad search is these days.)

Finding products more easily, of course, leads to better sales results. If you can find it, you can buy it…"

Click here to access our newsletter archives and read the August 8, 2007 issue in full.

Bookmark this post:

Posted by Laura Dawson, 7:00 am, Comments (0), permalink

Older Posts »

Email:

Username:

Password: