Show Notes: Report from the Digital Book World Marketing and Discoverability Conference

The Digital Book World Marketing and Discoverability Conference was held Sept.
24-25 and Book Business shared some highlights.

On discoverability:

Context, he [Perseus Book Group’s Rick Joyce] said, is one of the most important factors in the new world of discoverability, espousing the need for new types of recommendation engines. Referencing Arthur C. Clarke ’s Three Laws of Prediction (No. 3: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”), he
explained that publishers should focus less on what other customers have
purchased and more on what the individual consumer wants and needs, helping
them to discover not only the books they want, but the books they didn’t know
they wanted.

Also some interesting stats:

92 percent of book
consumers used email or instant messaging, 87 percent surfed the web, but only
18 percent said they visited some type of book social network.

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FYI—

THATCamp AHA will take place during the American
Historical Association annual meeting on Thursday, January 3rd, 2013.

THATCamp stands for
“The Humanities and Technology Camp.” It is an unconference: an open,
inexpensive meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn
and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.

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“Containerization of Information”

Containerization from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

Laura Dawson (@ljndawson) tweeted that everyone needs to
watch this and she knows what she’s talking about so I did as I was told and now I recommend
that you watch it, too. It’s a companion to the book Trillions: Thriving in the
Emerging Information Ecology and it draws an analogy between shipping containers and the storage and transport of information.

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Book blogger controversy

There
was a recent dust-up caused by an article by Nick Clark that appeared in The
Independent. The
first paragraph of the article ends with “rise of bloggers will leave the
industry ‘worse off’.”

John
Self responded in The Guardian with “Why book bloggers are critical to literary
criticism”

Bloggers are not
commissioned, not edited, don’t have to be good enough at it to earn money from
it. But these are strengths as well as weaknesses: no limitations based on what
a literary editor has space for, or a taste for; no need to turn them out at a
certain rate to earn a living; and they must earn their own readership, with no
support structure.

Brian
O’Leary’s response is brief enough that I’m not going to quote it—you should
just go read it yourself: Scratching my head.

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And now, for your entertainment

An interview with Ray Harryhausen from October 10, 1974

(via
BoingBoing)