Archive
The Long Tailed Book Seer
So in downtime over the past month or so we made The Bookseer, a fun little web app, and it went live last week. It’s really simple, but we’re delighted to note that it has seen a lot of love and quite a lot of action in its first week.
Seeing as the Bookseer is [...]
Published: June 14, 2009. Read more →
Vic Keegan on the Future of Book Sites
I’m sure you’ve all seen this, but well worth a read. It’s about new social media sites around books and reading, and Vic’s article is an overview of the “new start-ups fighting for attention in this fledgling space in an attempt to become the dominant provider”
Where is all this leading? As these book sites get [...]
Published: June 21, 2007. Read more →
Social Bookworking: the Karoo Test
It’s possibly heating up a little bit now. Just as AbeBooks.com announces that they are finally rolling in LibraryThing recommendations (which has to be a good thing), I thought I’d link to a few of the other sites doing similar things to Librarything.
Published: March 6, 2007. Read more →
The Master Plan: follow up (& Netflix)
I’m posting an edited transcript of an email correspondence I had with my friend Alex after he read my post yesterday about Abe and LibraryThing. It may be a little bit heady and technical, but I think it’s extremely interesting if you like the way things are recommended to people. And I think Tim from [...]
Published: October 6, 2006. Read more →
The Master Plan
Abebooks has announced a project to revise its search facilities. No big news, right?
Wrong. Abe will (and indeed, reading beyond the headline, is) be using the data collected by Librarything to create better recommendations. What does this mean? Librarything allows users to catalogue their books, and to create virtual libraries. As the data in [...]
Published: October 5, 2006. Read more →
Getting Dewey eyed about books
Design Observer has a nice post about cataloguing books (at least in the pre-Librarything era). Arguing about Melville Dewey (father of the bibliographic taxonomy most publishers I hope hate) versus Georges Perec may seem a little, um specialised:
Perec lists several possible ordering schemes in his essay, and in practice I have used a number of [...]
Published: September 2, 2006. Read more →
Music / Taste Mashup
Via GalleyCat (Via Buzz, Balls & Hype) an article from the WSJ (registration required so no link) on how publishers are looking to sell books to the kids via music:
Having seen the power of songs to promote TV shows, movies and even videogames, publishers and authors are increasingly experimenting with soundtracks for books. Writers like [...]
Published: August 23, 2006. Read more →
Carly Fiorina & other podcasts
On holiday I caught up with a load of podcasts, some from BEA, and others culled from elsewhere. One of these was the presentation given by ex Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.
She’s pretty controversial, mainly among those who either used to work for her (she was unceremoniously fired) or who didn’t like her style. [...]
Published: July 27, 2006. Read more →
July Emissions
None of these is necessarily fresh, but came up in my scouring of what had been happening whilst I was away.
The Wrong Tail. Slate takes a pop at the LT’s theory of everything.
What are the Long Tail’s limits? As a business model, it matters most 1) where the price of carrying additional inventory approaches zero [...]
Published: July 25, 2006. Read more →
The Long Tail
We (Apt Studio) were asked by Random House UK to create an online campaign for the UK release of Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. (Production still above)
This is very exciting as the concept behind the book is very relevant to publishing, and I blogged about Chris before I even knew we would be involved in [...]
Published: July 20, 2006. Read more →