Archive
A Year in the Life of a Book Recommender
We launched the Bookseer in June last year.
The site had a single purpose: to recommend new books to readers who have just finished something. It would be as simple as Google: a search box asking for the last book you read (and enjoyed). The site would then go and query Amazon, Librarything and other booky [...]
Published: April 26, 2010. Read more →
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 →
Links, 29 June 2007
Prince is giving away his new album, for free, with the Mail on Sunday. How awesome is that? Interesting not only from a Chris Anderson style perspective (that the future is free content, and paid-for experiences, i.e. gigs; see “Give away the music and sell the show“) but also because it is a totally new [...]
Published: June 29, 2007. Read more →
Longtail Extract Site
This is a bit of background about the site we’ve just launched for Random House Business books, to promote the paperback of Chris Anderson’s big-selling title The Long Tail.
Published: May 25, 2007. Read more →
Long Tail Paperback site launches
We’ve been really busy of late, and will write about this in more detail soon, but wanted to share something we’ve just today put live.
Our new site for Chris Anderson’sThe Long Tail has launched (on the same domain as before, www.longtailbook.co.uk
What’s interesting to us is that the site gives away over 20 extracts from [...]
Published: May 18, 2007. Read more →
We’re all dupes
Phenomenally stimulating and provocative article in the NY Times, analysing, in a post-longtail way, why
How could it be that industry executives rejected, passed over or even disparaged smash hits like “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter” and the Beatles, even as many of their most confident bets turned out to be flops? … Conventional marketing wisdom holds [...]
Published: April 24, 2007. Read more →
Links, March
In brief:
Another review of Google’s Unbound event for publishers. Quoting Chris Anderson, who notes that the average book sells 500 copies,
“If [authors] are writing books to be read, how can we maximize that?,” he asked. “De-stigmatize the mid-list, de-stigmatize the long tail — 999 readers is success! If you can turn that into 2,000, that’s [...]
Published: March 29, 2007. Read more →
The Times on LongTail economics
Today’s Times has a piece (Retailers tackle the Long Tail) paraphrasing (and interviewing) Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail. As ever, it’s all about aggregation;
Slow-selling products have always been aggregated but when it comes to making money they have never rivalled the hits.
Anderson said that may well be true for the established media companies [...]
Published: October 30, 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 →
Long Tail Stats
Below are some stats for the first month of the Long Tail promo being online. Make of them what you will – but we’re delighted that we’ve managed to direct a lot of the interest in the concept of the long tail towards the RHUK edition of the book.
The central tenet of our strategy [...]
Published: September 2, 2006. Read more →