It provides a little bit of background on how metadata works with search engines and with algorithms like Amazon’s recommendation engine, and offers a few simple tips [...]]]> I’ve written a post over on DigitalPublishing101.com to briefly explain how and where metadata is used to help sell books online.

It provides a little bit of background on how metadata works with search engines and with algorithms like Amazon’s recommendation engine, and offers a few simple tips — follow them all and you’re (almost) guaranteed to improve your e/book’s chances of being found in the right online places.

1. Provide complete metadata, including enhanced as well as core metadata. This might be obvious, but hopefully you’ll have a better understanding of why.
2. Descriptive copy should contain keywords, especially in the first 50-100 words.
3. Titles or subtitles might include keywords (this is not always possible or desirable).
4. Use categories, and provide several categories if you can (for instance, Amazon allows for up to 5).
5. Include prizes, awards, reviews (including some review excerpts), and media mentions.
6. Make excerpts available.
7. Use HTML tags in metadata if permitted.
8. Provide website links (for example to author pages). This is not always possible or permitted but use it if you can.
9. Apply these principles to author information as well as book information.
10. Add author location which will help online retailers target the local audience.

You can read the complete article here.

If you want a more detailed understanding of how to identify the right keywords, optimize your site and your metadata, and track your results, you might also want to check out this article on the subject of SEO for books.

And if you really want to become an expert on the subject of how to sell more e/books online, you can take the complete online course, Marketing 101 for Ebooks.  It’s much better than bad TV as a way to fill in a few rainy Autumn nights.

According to mobile app researcher Flurry, almost 90% of time spent reading books on these [...]]]> Smartphones are dramatically ahead of tablets when it comes to time spent reading books, according to a new study which tracks usage of the 1 billion smart devices now active in the world.

Click to enlarge image

According to mobile app researcher Flurry, almost 90% of time spent reading books on these devices is done using smartphones.

This finding is doubly surprising. Not only is phone-reading very high in total terms, it’s high when compared to tablet market share. 

I’m sure that most people, like me, would expect that tablet users (which include the iPad and Kindle Fire) would be over-represented in reading books, while smaller-screen smartphone users would be under-represented.

In fact, the opposite is true, according to Flurry’s findings. As these charts show, while tablets account for 18% of overall usage, they only account for 10% of book reading.

Click to enlarge image.

Smartphones, on the other hand, deliver 79% of active user sessions but 88% of book reading.

(The missing 2-3% is for the group of devices referred to as ‘Phablets’ — phones with over-sized screens, the best-known example of which is the Samsung Note.)

I think there are probably a couple of key things behind these numbers.

1. A lot of hard-core ebook readers would do their ‘large-screen’ reading on dedicated ebook readers like the black-and-white Kindles. These devices aren’t tracked by this study, and the hard-core readers they attract do a disproportionate amount of reading.
2. Flurry tracks users worldwide, so results might better reflect emerging market usage trends,  rather than the skew we see in most research to North America and key developed markets.
3. Perhaps it shows that more ebook reading than we think is taking place in short bursts on-the-go, in places such as cafes, queues, and commuting — ‘snacking’ to borrow the mobile advertising industry’s latest buzzword.

Whatever the impact these factors are having, the overall picture from this study points to a need for publishers to take their potential smartphone audience more seriously.

What perhaps is surprising is that bookstores achieved this ranking [...]]]> In a recent American study by book data specialist Bowker, bookstores were second only to favourite authors as the most important source of new book discovery. Few booksellers would find this surprising.

What perhaps is surprising is that bookstores achieved this ranking with just 19% of book buyers nominating them. Bowker’s study identified 44 sources influencing where readers discover new books.

If we wound the clock back 10, 20 or even 50 years, the picture would be quite different – fewer sources and a bigger role for bookshops in new book discovery. Conventional wisdom says if we look ahead 10, 20, or 50 years, the picture will show more fragmentation – and bookshops sinking even further.

This picture looks even worse as we watch the unseemly haste with which publishers scramble to replace bookshops with new online methods of ‘discoverability’.

But is the trend inevitable? Or is there something booksellers can do to reverse it? Part of the answer might lie in adopting a tactic that invaded the tech industry two decades ago and is now part of its fabric.

How the tech industry was transformed

In their first decade, personal computers mostly stood alone, unconnected to the wider computing world. But by the mid-1980s it was becoming common for them to be networked to each other and to the big mainframes that dominated corporate computing then. The problem in this pre-internet era was that every vendor had its own, incompatible system for networking.

Initially, each vendor tried to use this problem to its advantage, forcing customers to use their solutions alone to guarantee that everything would work together. But the customers rebelled: they wanted to be able to mix and match and to buy from whom they pleased. This forced competing suppliers to cooperate so that their systems would talk to each other. In the early 1990s, networking pioneer Ray Noorda coined the term “co-opetition” to describe the strategy in which it was in each supplier’s self-interest to help competitors reach its customers.

Skip forward a decade and a half. When the so-called Web 2.0 came along – the social web we know today rather than the original one-way, read-only web – some of its earliest users, the bloggers, took sharing to a new level by freely linking to and promoting others’ work, and encouraging other sites to do likewise with theirs. Eventually, even traditional media sites found that opening up and sharing widely, even with competitors, was good for business.

E-commerce sites embraced the same spirit. Amazon has been at the forefront, sharing most of its prime assets with competitors. A competitor can access Amazon’s world-leading physical warehousing and logistics, advertise and sell its competing goods on Amazon’s site, use Amazon’s rich metadata on its own site, and employ Amazon’s massive cloud computing power to run a competing service. Amazon has become the world’s most successful online retailer while (or perhaps because of) opening up almost every aspect of its business for competitors to use.

How a bookseller applies the lessons

In the world of bricks and mortar business, however, we often view competition quite differently. A recent example was the negative industry reaction to top UK bookselling chain Waterstones when it agreed to promote Amazon’s Kindle in-store. Waterstones isn’t just selling the Kindle devices. It also welcomes and openly encourages shoppers to download Kindle ebooks while in-store (for which it receives a cut), effectively turning its 300 high street locations into an Amazon showroom.

Looked at in conventional business terms, Waterstones’ move looks little short of suicidal. ‘Amazon is inviting Waterstones to top itself,’ screamed one headline in The Telegraph newspaper. But looked at in the light of how successful tech and online businesses operate in inter-connected markets, this move makes sense.

As the Bowker data on book discovery shows, bookshops are already operating in a world where readers have lots of choices for new book discovery with bookshops just a small part of their repertoire. In this world, the idea that a store in some way ‘owns’ a customer who is disloyal if they stray elsewhere to buy seems quaint. Waterstones can’t lock its shoppers into doing business with them, any more than those early computer companies could stop users building networks with their competitors.

So a better strategy than closed walls might be a welcoming and respectful openness.

In the UK market where Amazon accounts for three out of every four ebook purchases, Waterstones’ decision to ‘hand over their customers’ might be a coup rather than a capitulation. If you’re going to help customers to buy books in any format they want them, it makes sense to work with your biggest competitor rather than a tiny rival.

And Waterstones’ gains won’t just come from slender commissions on Kindles and Kindle ebooks. By making its customers’ reading lives simpler, it stands to boost its print market share, especially if its partnership with Amazon leads to cross-promotions, bundling deals and the like. Waterstones might enjoy other benefits, too, if publishers and authors see how its influence in selling books extends well beyond just those sold through its stores.

An opportunity for the industry

For the wider bookselling industry, there’s a lesson and an opportunity. The lesson from co-opetition is that when barriers come down and markets open up, your best strategy might be to work with competitors in ways that make your customers’ lives easier.

One of the biggest beneficiaries of co-opetition in the tech world was, ironically, the company that had dominated the industry for decades by locking in its customers and shutting out rivals: IBM. Once the walls started to crumble, IBM like most of the old guard hit trouble and looked doomed. Instead, it’s now America’s fourth largest corporation. Inspired new leadership opened up its technology, helped rivals sell to its customers, and rebuilt the company around being the best partner for users in a complex new environment.

Booksellers, at both a store-level and as an industry, face a similar challenge and similar choices. Ultimately, the best choice is to be visible and useful in as many places as your customers are. The worst choice is to be invisible and unhelpful. The more book discoveries you prompt, the more you’ll sell – even if your competitors capture many of the sales.

My guess is that influence – amplified through partnerships, online media and other channels – rather than location, price or convenience might be the currency of the leading bookstores of the future. At an industry level,  that influence – whether or not the purchase happens in bricks and mortar stores – is the best antidote to the too-common view of an industry in terminal decline. Getting in bed with friend and foe alike might be the best route to achieving it.

This article was published in the November 2012 issue of  News on Bookselling, the journal of the Australian Booksellers Association.

The [...]]]> Kobo pulled off an almost-clean sweep of the New Zealand market when it announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week partnerships with the two major bookstore chains Whitcoulls and Paper Plus, and the independent bookseller members of the Booksellers Association.

The deal could see Kobo tying up well over 80% of the bricks and mortar retail market with its devices and a deal that pays booksellers commissions on sales of Kobo ebooks to their customers.

The prevalence that this deal will give the Kobo brand in the New Zealand market is likely to prove a powerful counter-balance to Amazon’s Kindle which has benefited from the fragmentation of its competitors in other markets with none typically accounting for more than a few percent of the remaining market.

In terms of market share, New Zealand was already one of Kobo’s bright spots, even before this deal was announced. Its early partnership with leading bookseller chain Whitcoulls — combined with the continuing absence of competitors including Google, Apple and Barnes and Noble Nook — had given Kobo a relatively clear run. Its forthcoming presence in almost all book-related retail outlets is likely to label it a safe choice for consumers and provide a strong alternative to Amazon.

The overall market will also benefit from an injection of marketing resources and profile for ebooks. Figures from the Bowker international study released at the Frankfurt Tools of Change conference this week showed the New Zealand market lagging other key English language markets with just 15% of the online population purchasing ebooks in the past six months compared to 23% of online Australians and 22% each for the UK and US online populations.

Kobo also plans to push its self-publishing service, Writing Life, in New Zealand and is in discussions with the New Zealand Society of Authors to facilitate it. Kobo launched Writing Life in July to compete with Amazon’s very successful Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform.

Writing Life just received a major boost with this week’s announcement that it has acquired French digital publishing tools developer Aquafadas. These are professional-grade tools for producing advanced layouts from Adobe InDesign and QuarkXpress desktop software. Expect to see this technology at some point to be delivered online in a consumer-friendly version along the lines of Vook’s online production tools.

FOOTNOTE: I’ve developed two 4-week online courses: Digital Marketing 101 for Ebooks and Digital Publishing 101 for Ebooks. Visit DigitalPublishing101.com and sign up if you’re interested. I’ll notify you as soon as registrations for the next courses open.

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It's hard to remember or imagine but at that time Sony was the [...]]]> This blog started five years ago today, a couple of weeks before Amazon launched the game-changing Kindle and a couple of months after the industry had placed its hopes for a smooth transition to digital on its own open format, EPUB.

It's hard to remember or imagine but at that time Sony was the hot ticklet with its eInk-based e-reader and its connected ebookstore. Amazon took this model a year after Sony and turned it into the stellar success story we see today. Sony failed to capitalise on its early lead.

Like Apple which had transformed the music business with its iPod, Amazon didn't invent the ebook business. It took what was there, put it into a consumer-friendly package and marketed it superbly. And like Apple with its iPod/iTunes digital music success, Amazon captured more than half of the market (and almost 60% of the largest market, the US). And it has managed to hold this lead. None of its competitors has come close.

I'm at the Frankfurt Book Fair as I write this and a global study released by researcher Bowker confirms this. The research, conducted online, compares a dozen countries, including New Zealand, for ebook use. (Excuse the fuzzy picture but the general trend should be clear in the few countries compared here.)

Source of eBooks purchased in last six months. Source: Bowker

(The data in the chart above shows the site most frequently used for eBook purchases.)

The large mid-blue bar is Amazon whose share of purchases ranges from more than 70% in the UK to 52% in New Zealand and just 28% in Canada where home-grown Kobo seems to have done an outstanding job of holding Amazon at bay.

Kobo's relatively strong performance in New Zealand is helped by its local agent Whitcoulls. In Australia, its much weaker showing was probably caused by the closure of its original agent, the Angus and Robertson chain.

The Kindle's success continues to undermine EPUB as the ambitious new version, EPUB3, struggles to get traction a year after its release. It highlights the challenging position the industry is now in. Five years after the Kindle and EPUB, there's a clear digital path for simple narrative works but we seem to be little closer to a digital solution for the rest.

In many ways, we might be worse off because publishers are now confronted with so many format choices — including KF8, Amazon's rival to EPUB3. But KF8 adoption is also slow — at least as far as its use in rich format eBooks is concerned. This is partly due to Amazon's own slow roll-out: it has a large installed base of older Kindles that won't support the more advanced features and it's not in Amazon's — or publishers' — interests to suddenly lock out a large chunk of Amazon's user base from new ebooks.

So, where to in the next five years? Well, in many ways, we're back to where we were before October 2007. There's a plethora of formats, fragmented distribution channels, and a big opportunity waiting for eBooks 2.0, the move beyond our simple formats of today. Where's the next Amazon?

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If you’re one of the many publishers who is convinced that publishers have [...]]]> I’ve just read and listened to a lucid analysis of what might be the biggest challenge facing publishers and, most importantly, a practical solution to it.

If you’re one of the many publishers who is convinced that publishers have a future, but you have a disquieting feeling from not quite knowing what it will be, industry commentator Jane Friedman has an answer worth listening to. (That’s this Jane Friedman, not this Jane Friedman though I suspect they’d both agree with this piece.)

Friedman rightly focuses on the changing author-publisher relationship as a key shift affecting the role and importance of publishers. For reasons we’re all becoming familiar with, the balance of power in this relationship is moving strongly in the direction of authors who are feeling newly-empowered by the opportunities and new partners who can help connect them to their readers.

Jane Friedman at LitFlow-Thinktank. Photo: Joachim Loch / Kulturstiftung des Bundes

These shifts in the market are making it much easier for new players to compete with traditional publishers for those authors. “Now that there are more options, publishers have had to come out and say, ‘Hey, we actually have value, they’ve had to come out and defend themselves … This is just incredible, publishers would never have had to do this,” Friedman told an audience at the LitFlow-Thinktank conferencein Germany this week (links to audio of presentation).

Authors are in effect the other customer, she says, the first customer being the reader. But, says Friedman, ”the Big Six publishers are kind of the last in line to be .. empowering authors.”

For many decades now, authors have felt underserved and unsupported by their publishers. Yes, it’s an old cliché—the love/hate relationship between author and publisher—but the authors have reason to be unhappy, and the publishers know it. It’s unnecessary to detail all the ways that authors have become dissatisfied with publishers; anyone working in the industry is familiar with the complaints. We all acknowledge that most books and authors receive limited support and attention, and, for too many authors, this is not what they expect or want from their publisher relationship. Now that many alternative and better-paying publishing paths have opened up, authors are asking publishers “What have you done for me lately?”, and too frequently the answer is “Not enough for the royalty percentage and marketing support you offer.”

Publishers should be worried, but making YouTube videos in response is not the answer. Anyone in publishing who doesn’t see this as a growing problem might reflect on (1) the number of authors who’ve made exclusive deals with Amazon (2) the growing footprint of Amazon’s U.S. publishing program—and don’t forget singles and serials (3) the growing number of agency-based publishing programs and (4) the announcement of high-powered digitally enabled publishing enterprises such as Brightline.

Plenty of start-ups (and industry insiders) think they can beat the Big Six, and it’s not hard for a start-up to offer an author contract that’s better than what the Big Six typically offers. If the Big Six agree that authors are their biggest and most important asset to hold onto, then what are they doing to attract and keep important authors in the future? It certainly hasn’t been an offer of better royalties, even though publishing analyst Mike Shatzkin has suggested that would be wise in the long run.

Friedman proposes a way to turn this problem around and make it part of the solution to why publishers should continue to play an important role in authors’ careers.

The future I would like to propose is one in which the publisher truly serves as a partner that seeks to empower its authors, and freely shares as much knowledge and information as it has available. Those of us who have worked in publishing know that publishers are rarely forthcoming with authors about marketing plans or sales data, and we hold back information—we don’t want to open up “a can of worms.” But this mindset can’t survive in a future where each author expects full transparency and up-to-date information from business partners, not to mention trust and respect. Authors shouldn’t be told they are responsible for marketing and promotion while not be given all the tools needed to be successful at the task, but that is exactly what is happening today. Authors will have too many options to accept such a situation in the future.

Information sharing by publishers is merely the first step. Education (especially for first-time authors) and ongoing networking and advancement (for established authors) must be provided if authors agree to sign contracts that pay them less than a direct-to-consumer retailer like Amazon. Publishers, for the first time, have to earn their keep by providing a value that extends beyond production and distribution—and possibly even editorial direction. The biggest problem that authors must solve for themselves, year after year, is (1) staying competitive, current, and discoverable in a shifting digital landscape (2) having the right tools to be effective and in touch with their readers, and (3) having a strong network of connections that helps them better market and promote. All of these things are well within a publisher’s ability to assist with, only they haven’t been putting any resource into providing such assistance. They have been focused on their own corporate problems of shifting to a digitally enabled business, and squeezing as many sales as possible out of their mastery of print book sales and distribution. Most of the thinking is centered on self-preservation. But I’d like to suggest that the best self-preservation measure of all is becoming a house that’s known and respected for—in the eyes of its authors—being an active, long-term partner and resource. By empowering each author to do better, the publisher is ensuring more sales over the long term. Here are 3 key ways in which such a strategy pays off.

Plenty of publishers will ‘talk the talk’ about these partnerships, but it demands a shift of thinking and financial resources that most aren’t yet making in order to ‘walk the walk’ with the depth that Friedman is proposing. Friedman has much more to say. Read it here.

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Unlike Vook and PressBooks, the Inkling [...]]]> This is the final article in a series looking at a new category of online ebook production tools. The earlier reviews looked at PressBooks and Vook.

Unlike Vook and PressBooks, the Inkling Habitat online publishing platform is aimed squarely at the textbook market. It provides publishers with the tools to produce and distribute rich interactive textbooks, and similar types of consumer content such as how-to manuals and travel guides. In this regard, it resembles Apple’s iBooks Author but it takes quite a different approach from both iBooks Author (which runs on a Mac) and the other two online applications we’ve looked at.

Inkling textbooks can be viewed in the Inkling app (iPad and iPhone only) or in an HTML version for the web (click to enlarge)

Textbooks as software

The difference in approach is hinted at in its statement that ‘content is treated like software’. At the heart of Inkling is its own XML-based markup system which it calls S9ML. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a powerful, but complex, language which is used to ‘catalogue’ every element of the book, describing its structure in a way that computer programs can understand. Once this is done, the digital textbook can be run through a program and served up in different versions and formats as well as sold as chapters or repackaged components.

An important issue for publishers using the system will be the cost of markup and the ease with which they can re-use these marked-up source files outside the Inkling system. Inkling says that it plans to make the S9ML specification public once it is mature.

User-friendly online tools

Inkling claims to provide user-friendly online tools to take away some of this behind-the-scenes complexity. The company acknowledges that some training is needed and it also partners with outsourcing firms who can help publishers with some of the work. Inkling’s approach — adding detailed markup and structure to the publication and generating the final works programmatically — adds some extra overhead in producing a digital textbook. It will also pose organisational challenges with its demands on workflow and changes to long-established ways of working.

The payback comes from being able to use, reuse and revise the content, and from systems that can streamline the production of multiple titles. So for publishers, the issue comes down to choosing a production method that gets a one-off project done as cheaply as possible (and follows existing work practices), or one like Inkling that might cost more up-front but gets more from that content over its whole lifecycle.

Inkling’s target is the latter group and the Inkling Habitat platform is designed for large-scale use with features such as support for global teams and extensive revision control. Many larger publishers are already moving in this direction. It will be interesting to see if Inkling can extend this thinking, and the necessary tools and training, to smaller publishers too.

Free ebook production

Inkling plans to provide its tools free because they’ll take a cut of the sales that publishers make through the Inkling website and e-reading apps. [Update, 12 February 2013: Inkling opened its Habitat online service to publishers.] Publishers can also sell directly from their own websites or apps without paying Inkling a commission (unlike iBooks Author-produced works which must be sold through Apple’s iBookstore).

Inkling textbooks are output as apps (iPad and iPhone only at this stage) and HTML for the web (only supports Chrome and Safari browsers currently). This means they won’t be available through the major ebooksellers like Amazon, Kobo or Nook. That’s unlikely to be a major issue in the textbook market at this point in its development, but for consumer publishers looking at this technology, it will pose some challenges for reaching a large consumer market. Given the sophistication of Inkling’s  system, there should be no technical reason why it couldn’t generate a future EPUB3 or Kindle KF8 version (perhaps with some feature limitations) but I’ve seen no public statements on this.

Here’s a video showing the iPad and iPhone apps and an interview with Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis (15:18). You can try out an Inkling book on the web (free sign-up required, only supports Chrome and Safari browsers), or download the free iPhone or iPad apps.

Inkling Habitat is still in private testing mode (publishers can apply online to be part of an ‘early adopter program’) but Inkling plans to open it to all publishers later in 2012.  [Update, 12 February 2013: Inkling opened its Habitat online service to publishers.]

Note that I haven’t had access to the Inkling production system to write this article. It’s been compiled from public sources and is not a hands-on review like the earlier PressBooks and Vook articles in this series. I’ll update it when I can access the product directly.