Yesterday I ran across the Indigo Chapters website while looking for some textbooks for school and I saw that Rick Mercer was coming out with a new book. Apparently he is coming out with a book that contains the text from select number of rants from the Monday Report. It sort of reminds me of some books that are coming out that are really compilations of blog postings.
Anyways, I noticed that Indigo Chapters put up a link to video on Rick Mercer’s book page which was meant for promotional purposes. The first thought that came to my mind was that it was cumbersome and awkward to download a Quicktime file in order to view a short clip of what Rick Mercer had to say about his new upcoming book. Wouldn’t it have been better for Chapters to simply embed a YouTube clip or simply embed a flash player to make it easier for visitors or potential customers to view the short video clip?
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Over the past year, HarperCollins and Random House have introduced their own custom developed “sharing” feature for many of their books so that people have the ability to share an excerpt of a book on their blog or website. Unfortunately for many Canadian publishers, there has been no sign of a solution that would provide them with the same competitive edge — at least not without additional funding that would allow for them to compete with the larger publishing houses (who are often also subsidiaries of multinational corporations).
People knock Google a lot for what they do against the publishing community, but from my perspective Google has done more for smaller presses in a smaller amount of time than any additional funding could have done for Canadian publishers. Google and numerous other Internet revolutionaries have levelled the playing field for any company, small or big, to be successful. Why is this ultimately the way things should be? Because it helps the customer. What use is a great product if a customer can’t find it? What use is a great product if a crappy product is overshadowing it with its million dollar marketing campaign? The bigger picture and vision is out there for Canadian book publishers to grasp, we just have to get around this whole hurdle that we keep trying to get our heads around, and that is absolute control. No one, no organization and no company can have absolute control any longer, it is just not viable — not even for Google.
Google has introduced an excerpt sharing function that allows for people to share excerpts from books in the public domain. I think this is a great beginning and I hope they will build upon this idea to allow publishers to do the same. By doing so, the edge that larger companies have had will diminish and at least Canadian book publishers regardless of size will have a voice that is somewhat equal in volume.
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Yet it’s my job. For some reason I don’t hate my job. I despise following the masses, I much prefer creating my own path and trying something new. But I have to admit it is important to know what it is out there and what has worked.
Bokardo.com is one of the blogs that I enjoy reading because of its blend of perspectives between design and marketing. In reality, everything is marketing because regardless of what we are specifically doing … we are marketing. I also don’t like the fact that I will have to state that life revolves around marketing. The fact that I am stating this makes me gag. Some may suggest it is economics but in my opinion, economics is the study of the cause and reaction which are taken from the impact and consequences of marketing (simplification, I know). Bokardo.com has a great blog post about What Do People Talk About? which mentions Guy Kawasaki’s post about next-generation marketing and a book called Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-mouth Marketing (look at that, already marketing…).
Bokardo.com and Guy Kawasaki both list the 9 major themes from this book so I won’t bother listing them here. I do find it interesting that marketers (and humans in general) will always attempt to label describe human behaviour with such simplicity. So that at the end of the day, I ask myself … are we sheep or are we sheep-ish? Regardless, as I stated in the beginning, it’s my job to understand this stuff and I would agree with Joshua Porter of Bokardo.com that the themes listed in the book are overused. I must also point out that these 9 major themes appear overused because they have been simplified and because they are simplified, they are now technically overused reasoning.
This brings me to what I really want to discuss and that is Buzz Canuck’s 1% Army blogging tournament. I actually didn’t really want to get into this, but I figure I should have some fun with blogging and experiment with marketing ideas. Then again, I hate trends. The idea is to blog as usual and submit your best posts against other blogs to be evaluated. We’ll see how this crazy little cog does eh? Maybe I will survive this trend. It should be fun to participate with fellow Canadians who blog about marketing, social media, design and digital creations.
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I’ve decided to make myself a virtual bookshelf and thanks to Shelfari, I am now able to. I think it’s an interesting and more visual method of sharing what books I own and my opinion of them. The more typical aspect of Shelfari is the “others who own this book … also own … “. One thing I do like about Shelfari is that they are not depending on Amazon’s infrastructure so much and are trying to have their own database of the different books out there. It does to some degree “learn” about new books through an option of searching on Amazon when it can’t find a particular book on its own database. I am curious as to how much more effective Shelfari will be at providing new and creative ways for people to find new books that would be of interest to them.
For the meantime, you may check out My Bookshelf on the menu link or check out the public page via Shelfari.
—– Update —–
On a side note, I started reading about Shelfari and realized that Amazon.com is investing in the relatively new startup. How unfortunate that we just can’t get away from Amazon and that the online retailer is almost everywhere with little competition. Don’t get me wrong, I love Amazon and the ideas that they have brought to the table but I believe independent diversity and competition in a business environment is necessary in order to truly push forward the customer’s best interest. That being said, the fact that Amazon invested heavily into IT infrastructure technology of its own makes it quite the heavy weight to compete against.
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Just a quick post. Read/WriteWeb has posted 5 Alternative Ways to Browse Amazon, most of which are excellent ways to find new products that one may be interested in. Now … it seems that people come up with all sorts of marketing ideas and visualization techniques for the music and movie industry yet when it comes to books, we tend to have nothing to show. With BISAC codes to work with and the ratings and reviews that Amazon’s infrastructure provides, someone has got to be able to code a visualization for books. Some people may ask why? I will ask why not? It’s the only way to move the entire industry towards a state where people can truly find what they are looking for. Do not tell me about word-of-mouth because that is a constant factor in any market.
Anyways, take a look at the different visualizations that have been developed to browse Amazon’s movie and music offerings. I think it’s worth giving some thought with regards to finding new ways of marketing books… maybe one of the bigger publishers will have the income to push forward something like this. Or maybe … just maybe … Canadian publishers can work together to develop something that provides a real alternative online, rather than a band-aid solution based on grants from the government.
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My friend Sahrah emailed me a link to goodreads (yet another web 2.0) website. After the huge impact of facebook on the world around me, not to mention all those other major web 2.0 websites, goodreads almost seems like yet another site jumping on the bandwagon. There are its pros and cons as usual, but I wonder if this site will really help the book industry? It almost seems like an extended version of Amazon’s ratings and reviews with a little web 2.0 sharing slapped on to it. The reviews are short and sweet which is great but they are listed over page after page and it begins to be overwhelming or rather the effect of those individual reviews are diluted. Each review no longer carries as much weight to help the book because there are just so many on one page.
Check it out for yourself
The positive thing about goodreads (at least from my standpoint for today) is that I ran across a fantastic cover of one of my favourite books, Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. This was the Centennial Edition. I am almost almost encouraged to buy it. So close to clicking on the buy button, but why stop? What stops me?
I already have a great hardcover edition with illustrations from Readers Digest. Otherwise, I’d love to pick this one up. Great illustration and use of colours here. Not so sure about the typeface for the title, but it’s decent.
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