Blog — BookNet Canada

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Reading for the Holidays?

BookNet Canada’s November 23 Code Meet Print session looks at the brave frontier of …reading! The session, called Reading Is Social, is timely as we move into the season that everyone in the book industry is pumped for—the holidays! Are people still going to buy that someone special a dead tree copy of that great non-fiction title, or are they thinking about how they can really show they care by getting involved in the latest greatest trends in e-reading? How are they going to decide what to pick up for their Secret Santa exchange? Where will they find out about new books?

Questions like these made us wonder: How is the book industry leveraging game mechanics, crowdsourcing, and social platforms to make reading even more attractive?

Online Reviews Sell Books, So Let People Post Them

Customer reviews are becoming an increasingly common element of product sites. Customer reviews have been on Amazon.ca for as long as I can remember and they’re also on the Chapters website. Reader reviews fuel Goodreads. But why haven’t publishers jumped on board, especially those selling directly from their sites? And why aren’t customer reviews being built into a retailer website creation or redesign?

They're Always After Me Red Lemonade!

Richard Nash needs no introduction but if he does you can do no better than to tune into the talk he gave at the 2010 BookNet Technology Forum. Nash has been re-imagining the business of publishing for some time and, in fact, left his post at Soft Skull to begin building that re-imagining.

Red Lemonade, his new project, is all about connecting readers and writers and has that social community goodness baked right in. There are no walled gardens here.

Does this on its own reinvent publishing?

A Book Algorithm that Works

Many businesses use algorithms to make product recommendations, including book retailers such as Amazon and Chapters. If your customer base is large and mostly online it’s an easy way to generate recommendations for a wide range of customers. But when it comes to books, the system hasn’t always served the customer well.