LJNDawson.com, Consulting to the Book Publishing Industry
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It's Time for Author Videos Again

Years ago, when I was at Barnes & Noble.com, Steve Riggio launched a series of expensively-produced author interview videos, which (after a few months) experienced such little traffic that the project was ultimately scrapped.

A couple years later, when I was at Sirsi, I licensed author videos from Charles Halpin's Bookstream, Inc. These videos were much less expensive (and the quality was really great), but the time was too early for them. We couldn't get libraries to adopt them.

Shortly after this, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I was approached by David Freeman, a British book TV host, about his own line of videos. Given the difficulty we were having getting libraries to accept the Bookstream videos, I had to turn him down.

And now...author videos are popping up all over the place. GalleyCat reports this morning on Turn Here, which produces BookVideos.tv - they've signed up Library Thing and Buy.com, among other partners. In June, USA Today reported on the book video phenomenon. Could it be that their time has finally come?

Could it be that all this time we were waiting for YouTube to come along and get people accustomed to watching things on their computers? Congratulations, Charles and David - you are demonstrably ahead of your time.

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