Digital Book World 2013

I was able to attend the Digital Book World 2013 (DBW13) conference on  January 16 and 17, 2013 thanks to a grant from MSDE/DLDS   The conference was attended by over 1000 constituents of the “book” trade (including 2 librarians and myself.)    

2012 was the year publishers defined the gap in their business plan as not having a direct way to reach book buyers.   They were seeing the emergence of Amazon as the dominant sales venue, ebook sales saw triple digit increases,  and Borders folded 800 book stores.    At the 2012 Tools of Change conference the audience was told that big data was the path to success.   From the presentations and conversations at the DBW13 conference, it seems that the publishers have invested in staff and mechanisms that allow them to collect and analyze the data about book buyers. 

The publishers were confident that they could “sense” their customers using the data they collect.    Using their large warehouses of data, the publishers predicted that in 2013 they will be able to “find” customers for future purchase based on past purchases.   They will transition from marketing new material based on the author and shift their marketing dollars toward people who have bought this type of material before. 

The challenge publishers face is called “discoverabilty.”  How do buyers find books to buy?  With Amazon capturing a vast majority of book purchases online and the finding that people go online when they know what they want, how can publishers get their books in front of buyers?  The current pattern is that book buyers go into bricks and mortar books stores (and I would add libraries)  browse for what they want, and then go home and order it online.  They call this “showrooming.”    At this point there is no good online equivalent of “showrooming.”  (only 10% of book discovery comes from online marketing, the majority is word of mouth.)

Publishers are planning for a future in the US with no large national book store chains.  They do foresee selling books in every retail outlet in some form (kind of like RedBox at the grocery store).   With the declining amount of shelf space to showroom books, they will compensate with better metadata and social media marketing.    Publishers will drive online discoverability with enhanced and expanded “keywords” that will put a book in front of the online searcher.  They will also target “people who bought this book” in social media in the hopes that they “like” or “Share” the post with their friends. 

Another strategy to drive discoverability is “price innovation.”    In short, they will experiment with Kindle Daily Deals and the exposure that brings as a book rises up the Amazon best seller list.  For example, If you drop the price of a book to 99 cents for 24 hours, the amount of sales during that time period will drive it up the Amazon best seller list.   And on the Amazon Best Seller list, the book will be displayed for every amazon book search. 

The good news is that as ebook fiction sales helped to stabilize the publishers, they are now more willing to experiment with non-fiction and illustrated (children’s) ebooks.  The rise of the tablet over the dedicated ereader device is also driving this experimentation. 

As for libraries, I have always thought our online catalogs to find library materials could be better, and I hope that the strides publishers make toward online discoverability can be applied to our catalogs and that we can also find tools to import their improved metadata into our MARC records.