Posts tagged publishing
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Simon & Schuster in the Shadows: When Private Equity Casts a Pall on Publishing's Legacy
"A library ought to be the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life." - Norman Cousins What happens when the sanctity of the written word collides with the capitalist thirst for profit? This timely question comes to the fore as the storied publisher Simon & Schuster falls into the hands of private equity. KKR, the infamous "barbarians at the gate" of the 1980s leveraged buyout era...
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How Blockchain Could Impact the Publishing Industry
The publishing sector is now being influenced by blockchain and NFTs. NFTs are used by conventional publishers to create communities and interact with readers. Let's examine how blockchain has drastically altered the publishing sector. In the realms of business and finance, blockchain technology is no longer a buzzword. The potential of blockchain technology has been brought to our attention throughout different busi...
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Machine Learning and Bestseller Prediction: More Than Words Can Say
There’s been much recent conjecture on whether book sales can be predicted by text analysis alone. My company, Kadaxis, has dedicated the past few years to machine learning research and product development for the publishing industry. In our early days, we set out to build an algorithm to predict bestsellers, and tested it in the wild. In this post, I’ll share my perspectives on why the text alone isn’t enough. If Yo...
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Who Uses the Keywords in Metadata?
We often hear that keywords are important to help readers find and discover books. But what does that mean, and do keywords actually make a difference? In this post, we look at how keywords are used to search book websites (in particular, online booksellers), and their adoption by publishers. For this investigation, I had help from Pat Payton (Bowker) and Catherine Toolan (Firebrand). We set out to answer the followi...
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What are off-page keywords?
In the world of publishing metadata, when we talk about keywords, we’re talking about structured off-page keywords, often sent in an ONIX file, from a publisher to a retailer like Amazon. The retailer indexes the keywords and matches them against customer search queries, in order to display relevant books to them. Keywords are made up of phrases used to describe a book and their purpose is to give a search engine clu...
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A Publisher's Advantage Over Indie Authors
View image | gettyimages.com When it comes to book discovery and retail search, traditional publishers have two advantages over indie publishers. More Keywords The first is the ability to add more keywords to a book. Most independent authors will be able to add 5-7 keywords to their book's metadata. Each keyword (or phrase) provides an opportunity for the book to be matched with more search queries. The more sea...