"The fact that we already have virtual robots standing in for retail clerks, and cell phones that read out loud, is evidence that the world is about to chance in even more fantastical ways"- From Gary Wolf's illuminating piece on futurist and singularity guru Ray Kurzweil in the April 2008 issue of Wired.How does Kurzweil fit into the book world? He is basically the godfather of digitization; his inventions include the first omni-font optical character recognition (a computer program capable of recognizing text printed in any normal font), the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first flat-bed scanner,...
Vendor Satisfaction and Online Bookselling
Last week Which?, a Consumer Reports type organization in the United Kingdom, released the results of a survey focusing on customer satisfaction as it relates to online shopping for entertainment products.Abebooks UK lead the field with a rating of "89% for overall satisfaction and were praised for how easy it was to find products on their site." The sample size for AbeBooks was pretty slight at 89 respondents where Amazon UK had 2812 and, the other company that shared the top spot with AbeBooks, Play.com had 416 respondents. Categories included Price, Availability, Delivery and Returns.I would love to see someone...
The Rise of the Bookshelf in the Internet Age
Neverending Luca Nichetto & Andreoli, 2007One aspect of book culture that seems to be flourishing is bookcase design. Hardly a week goes by without me seeing an image of a newly designed bookcase; the designs and creativity seem endless."If you've still got an Ikea "Billy" holding up the wall in your apartment, maybe it's time you freshened up," is how Rain Noe puts it in his post over at Core77, "If the Kindle Wins, Bookshelf Designers Lose." Freshome has posted a gallery of their favorite 30 contemporary bookshelf designs of the last year and a blog called Bookshelf has recently...
Beautiful Children for Free
***********************************************Update 3/4: According to Random House during the 72 hours that the book was available to download for free they received:- just under 30,000 pageviews,-20,000 unique visitors-just under 15,000 copies of the book were downloaded.Download results from Amazon and the other publishing partners who participated are not yet available.***********************************************Just days after throwing open their digital doors and committing to DRM-free audiobooks Random House has announced that they will be opening the digital door for printed books as well. The newly released and heavily hyped debut novel by Charles Bock, "Beautiful Children," will be available for free via a PDF download.The...
Dear Bookseller. Marketing the Self-Published Book
This was found in a recently acquired book of poetry by Bill Knott. It was printed on a standard sheet of 8.5 x 11 paper, folded and laid in.With the glacial shift underway in the world of publishing one can easily see a wave of similar messages accompanying self-published books. The "review material", the publicity component of the book that is inserted in copies going to reviewers and booksellers, can become a great source of creativity for the self-published author and just might make the difference as to whether or not your book gets read.Knott, an ardent self publisher for...