Over the past couple of days Joe Wikert did a series of posts on his Publishing2020 blog on how bookstores can compete with online entities.
He suggested…
creating an online help desk available to in-store customers (post)
making loyalty programs more meaningful and more convenient (post)
allowing customers to try before they buy — book rentals (post)
offering book buy [...]
On September 18th I ragged on HarperCollins Canada for abandoning urls that had already been indexed by Google. After finding a search result for something I wanted, I was then redirected to a generic page that didn’t have what I was looking for at all. Is this ‘01? That is a really poor UX. I [...]
A video from this year’s Web 2.0 Expo (NY), Clay Shirky talks about how our mechanisms for processing information have become obsolete — at personal, social, and systemic levels. This is by far the best video I have seen from this year’s conference. It runs about 25 minutes. Shirky starts off talking book publishing — [...]
Gary Vee’s speech is pretty awesome. He swears a bit so be careful at work. His book is for sale here.
I have been following both the McNally Robinson blog and the McNally Jackson blog for a couple of months. I have been meaning to write about my impressions and my thoughts on book store blogs for some time and haven’t gotten to it. I am starting to think I may never get to it. Just [...]
I plucked this tweet out of my tweeter stream the other day and decided to check out BookGlutton.com. The idea here is that you form informal (and asynchronous) reading groups using the site as the hub. See the video for more info.
The two neat things about this site is it offers a real time chat [...]
I spotted this hoarding at Roselawn and Yonge when I was in North Toronto this evening. It looks like Indigo Books is on schedule with their new green living spinoff concept — Pistachio. I have to hand it to them, they are good at lifestyle branding. It makes a lot of sense to spinoff the [...]
I don’t know where Harper Collins is coming from anymore. Under former-CEO Jane Friedman they seemed to project a determined optimism about the digital future — they would experiment with this and that but at the end of the day — rest assured — they would own, warehouse, and control their inventory. Other houses seemed [...]
I just heard about a guy selling CDs out of his apartment in Boston. That was all he does – he sells CDs via Amazon. And he has a nice apartment. Today, the New York Times has an essay on the middle-economy between used-bookstores and mega-chains. Sellers, using Amazon, can now achieve scale like never [...]
Social networks for booklovers have been in the news lately. The reports seem to suggest Amazon is cornering the market on community sites, but not to be forgotten is Indigo Books’ entry in this space. Indigo’s “Community“, as it is so blandly called, launched last September. I wanted to mark the anniversary by gathering my [...]