The US ISBN agency, Bowker, reports a 21-percent increase in self-published ISBNs—not titles—from 2014 to 2015: another indication of quickly rising interest in indie publishing. Read More
International Identifiers: A Few Words About ISNI With Laura Dawson
No disambiguation needed, Laura Dawson is one of the best-known identifier and metadata specialists in US publishing. And she has opened a new international ISNI agency. Read More
Data-Dancing: How big is self-publishing?
‘Shock and awe.’ I’m here with the same question asked by my colleague, Bookseller editor Philip Jones in his companion piece to this one: How big is the market for self-published titles? “The question is a simple one for which there is no simple answer,” Jones writes. “In fact, there are lots of complicated answers.” We want your… Read More
The winter of our discontent with the ISBN
ISBN: Not much more traction than the first snowfall on London I’m just glad Amazon & B&N do reveal overall sales ranks so we can measure their mix of sales that way. Other retailers, including Apple, do not, limiting us to only estimating the very top books in a limited number of categories on those… Read More
AuthorEarnings: ISBN On Ice!
Everything’s Coming Up Indie. Right? As slippery as the business of publishing-industry statistics is, the author Hugh Howey and his unnamed associate referred to as Data Guy have now given us a year of AuthorEarnings.com reports. This is a good thing. Despite Howey’s detractors and some of their misgivings, the AuthorEarnings series of interpretive essays have… Read More
'Grace notes for ebooks': A new Trajectory for discoverability
When the machines read your book The Bookseller on the stands in London this morning reports that Bowker — the ProQuest-owned US ISBN agency and publishing research firm — is in final talks for a partnership with a company called Trajectory. The aim at Bowker is to offer authors and small publishers a new way to generate… Read More
At Frankfurt Book Fair: 'You gave me unlucky ISBN numbers'
“Prices should allow ready participation in ISBN…by all types of publishers” Ironically, that clarification of the mandate from the International ISBN Agency runs right into this comment in the United States: I wouldn’t be allowed to answer a question about, ‘Are you making a profit or aren’t you making a profit?’ That’s Beat Barblan, Bowker’s director… Read More
Who Has Time For Publishing’s 'Long Tail'?
‘Sales Are Down For Most Authors’ Sales are down for most authors. You don’t see blog posts about it or tweets, but it’s a reality. And the reason is simple: there’s more content out there than ever before. That’s the self-publishing author-turned-publisher Bob Mayer in a blog post at Digital Book World (DBW), The Content… Read More
Torchin' For Books Data
Nobody came forward to say we have too much books data. The fact that we cannot see the size and shape of the publishing industry today, however, strikes some as more problematic than others. And shortly after The FutureBook.net community’s #FutureChat on the problem of missing data, I was reminded once more of how many folks… Read More
Reedsy: Bending into digital self-publishing
In the graphics for Reedsy, you sometimes spot “cattails,” as we call them in the sea islands of South Carolina. Reeds. Thus one can go into an interview here hoping that the cutesy name for this new company isn’t a misspelling of “read.” Big relief: “The name is meant to refer to reeds,” says chief operating officer Ricardo… Read More