At this morning’s Publishers Launch Frankfurt conference, Bowker’s Kelly Gallagher announced two important data initiatives. In the US, Bowker is rolling out PubTrack Digital, a service to track actual ebook unit sales for (and from) participating publishers. Bowker’s way of getting around the unwillingness so far from retailers to share data in a common system is to work with publisher’ own invoices for their ebook sales. They take each publisher’s own data and integrate it into their aggregated data pool. Since they are working from publishers’ billing accounts, that means the data lags the marketplace by roughly five weeks–but it […]
