Whether you were there or not, some of the Digital Book World presentations and data are available online in a variety of forms.
It’s very rare for us to use the phrase “must read,” but Nielsen’s white paper on The Link Between Metadata and Sales that accompanies president of Nielsen Book Jonathan Nowell’s Wednesday presentation certainly qualifies. First presented at our Publishers Launch event in Frankfurt and now expanded and revised, it demonstrates with great precision the clear extent to which more quality metadata increases book sales (based on UK data). Fiction shows the greatest improvement when four key “enhanced” elements–short and long descriptions, review and author biography–are included in the record. Online sales for titles with all four of those pieces of information included are 178 percent higher.
PDF download
Verso Digital‘s survey of book-buying behavior is viewable here.
From futurist, author and Wednesday speaker David Houle–who is working with Sourcebooks on their just-announced agile publishing initiative–there is a free download of a special edition of his 2007 book THE SHIFT AGE. The DBW edition includes a new introduction tied to his speech and 15 of his past columns “that pertain to the the publishing industry and its move into the Shift Age.”
Sourcebooks
At the Digital Book World site, a short video presents brief interviews with presenters including Ellen Archer at Hyperion, James McQuivey of Forrester, Steve Potash at OverDrive and Evan Ratliff from The Atavist.
DBW video