Booknet Canada

This month in the BookNet Canada podcast we talk with Ashleigh Gardner, Head of Partnerships at Wattpad about the evolution of Wattpad as a company, their models for monetizing content, and some of the things Wattpad has learned from their largest audience - the under 30 set. Ashleigh also talked to us a little bit about Wattpad's newest app, Tap, and it's freemium, candy-crush-like model.

In this mini episode, we run through the bookish highlights of 2016, including the current size of the Canadian book market, industry updates, and new research on consumer buying habits.

In the second part of our series on the print book and why it won't be going away any time soon, we talk with David Sax, the author of the new book, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter. With the recent resurgence of brick-and-mortar bookstores and the plateauing of ebook sales, David sees a bright future ahead for physical books and the people who love them.

Is the print book as a technology underrated? In this month's episode, Joanne McNeish, a professor who studies the resilience of incumbent technologies, discusses why readers prefer print books, the challenges ebooks will have to overcome to be more competitive, and why we shouldn't expect physical books to ever be replaced entirely. Stay tuned for Part 2 in December 2016.

At last year's ebookcraft conference, Teresa Elsey, the Digital Managing Editor of the Trade & Reference Division at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, shared her experiences maintaining backlist ebooks with her team. Besides the technology advances that affect the quality of those earlier conversions, she explained that those backlist ebooks aren't getting any more semantic, aren't getting any more legal, aren't getting any more accurate, and have increasingly irrelevant metadata. In this thought-provoking talk, Teresa discusses the challenges and questions that arise when books turn into software and ebooks don't go away after you've made them. Learn more about ebookcraft: http://ebookcraft.booknetcanada.ca

Publishers opening their own physical bookstores seems to be all the rage these days. We sit down with two Canadian publishers—House of Anansi and Penguin Random House Canada—to talk about their new shops and why they've decided to take the plunge into brick-and-mortar.

Long live the audiobook! Thanks to smartphones, podcasts, and our oh-so-busy lives, the digital audiobook is making a comeback. We talk with some industry players to discuss the format's reinvention, how the industry is adapting to increased demand, and where Canadian-produced audiobooks fit into all this. Hungry for more data? Keep an eye on the BookNet Canada Blog in the coming weeks for more results from our research: booknetcanada.ca/blog.

Laura Brady, ebook developer and principal of Brady Type, joins the BookNet podcast to educate us about the benefits and challenges associated with bringing accessible features to ebooks in Canadian publishing. We talk about ableist privilege, InDesign quirks, and if the future of print and digital in harmony includes coding that old book smell.

After another round of inspiring talks, illuminating research, and innovative ideas at our annual Tech Forum conference on digital developments in the book publishing industry, we're here to share some highlights from the conference. We've got consumer research on how millennials buy and read books, how and why the industry should work to include more diverse voices, five recommendations for improving your book metadata in today's complex marketplace, and lessons for encouraging grassroots innovation at a legacy publisher. To see videos of all the Tech Forum presentations in their entirety, visit booknetcanada.ca/tech-forum.

It's been a big year for adult colouring books in Canada: they've dominated the non-fiction bestseller lists, adults are frequenting drinking 'n' colouring nights, and everyone seems to have an opinion about the trend. So are they on the decline, or here to stay? We investigate by examining sales trends from the past year, talking with consumers and experts on the subject, and surveying adult colouring book buyers to learn more about their buying habits and preferences. Hungry for more data? Keep an eye on the BookNet Canada Blog in the coming weeks for more results from our research: booknetcanada.ca/blog.

Kaya Thomas, creator of the app We Read Too, joins BookNet on the podcast this month. While still in her undergrad at Dartmouth College, Kaya developed We Read Too—a book resource application that showcases a directory of hundreds of children's and young adult fiction books written by and for people of colour—which contains over 600 books and has over 4,000 downloads. Kaya has held software engineering internships at Time Inc and Intuit working on mobile applications. She was a CODE2040 2015 Fellow and is a technical volunteer mentor for Black Girls Code. For her work in education and technology, Kaya was recently honoured by First Lady Michelle Obama at the 2015 Black Girls Rock Awards. She joins us to talk about her favourite books, breaking into coding, and diversifying the publishing industry. techforum.booknetcanada.ca

Can quantitative analysis be used to predict bestselling or prize-winning books? We discuss this question and more with Andrew Piper, an associate professor at McGill University where he's also the director of .txtLAB, a digital humanities laboratory focused on applying computational approaches to literature and culture. This month, it's all about how data can be used to better understand books. To learn more about .txtLAB, check out their blog: http://txtlab.org/

In this month's episode, we ask our Bibliographic Manager, Tom Richardson, to ruminate on how subject metadata can be optimized to better serve the book industry. Strap in for 20 minutes of subject codes, meandering, and lots of telling it like it is. Looking for the keywords white paper mentioned in the episode? Find it right here: https://www.bisg.org/best-practices-keywords-metadata.

BookNet Canada invites Canadian publishing superstars Allister Thompson, Leonicka Valcius, and Rachel Letofski to discuss the growing trend of adults purchasing Young Adult books for themselves, but misidentifying the target audience for those books as adult. According to a report put out by BookNet Canada entitled The Canadian Book Buyer 2015, consumers think they're buying 14% juvenile and 50% fiction, though 2014 purchasing trends indicate consumers are buying 38% juvenile and 31% fiction. Does this variance indicate that adults are trending towards juvenile without realizing it?

There are three iron laws of information age creativity, freedom, and business, woven deep into the fabric of the Internet's design, the functioning of markets, and the global system of regulation and trade agreements. You can't attain any kind of sustained commercial, creative success without understanding these laws—but more importantly, the future of freedom itself depends on getting them right. Presented by Cory Doctorow at Tech Forum 2015 / BookNet Canada / March 12, 2015 booknetcanada.ca/technology-forum

This week’s episode is very meta, in that it’s a podcast about podcasting. If your mind is still intact after being so spectularly blown, and if you’re interested in how podcasting can help you build a relationship with your audience, then you should definitely give it a listen. The talk is from Anshuman Iddamsetty, who up until recently hosted Hazlitt Magazine’s book podcast, The Arcade. (It was retired after more than 50 stirring episodes.) In his Tech Forum talk, he explains the unique power of sound and how it’s the ideal medium for fostering intimacy, trust, and loyalty. Presentation slides are available here: http://www.slideshare.net/booknetcanada/sound-strategy-how-can-11minute-podcast-can-change-a-books-life-tech-forum-2015-anshuman-iddamsetty Presented by Anshuman Iddamsetty (Hazlitt) at Tech Forum 2015 / BookNet Canada / March 12, 2015 booknetcanada.ca/technology-forum

With the growth of subscription services such as Scribd and Oyster, and sites such as Pottermore, many publishers are starting to think differently about their businesses. The time has come for experimenting with conversion architectures: business models that involve attracting an audience, retaining it in various ways (website visits, email lists, newsletters, etc.) and monetizing it. Brian O'Leary explores how conversion architectures work and how they apply to current—and, more importantly, future—book content models. You'll leave this session ready to strategize new ways of marketing and selling content to your readers. Presented by Brian O'Leary (Magellan Media Consulting) at Tech Forum 2015 / BookNet Canada / March 12, 2015 booknetcanada.ca/technology-forum

Striking a balance between books, games, and community. Keith Fretz of Scholastic US explores three main components of a successful transmedia property: attracting and retaining interest with gamification, using usage data to inform the evolution of your product, and building and maintaining a vibrant community. Presentation slides: http://www.slideshare.net/booknetcanada/transmedia-success-striking-a-balance-between-books-games-and-community-tech-forum-2015-keith-fretz Presented by Keith Fretz (Scholastic US) at Tech Forum 2015 / BookNet Canada / March 12, 2015 booknetcanada.ca/technology-forum

As more and more publishing houses bring in talented digital employees there’s a likely clash of cultures on the horizon. How can publishers with their rich history work alongside technologists and their history of “disrupting” everything? A sometimes humorous, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately optimistic look at the future of the people behind the books. Presentation slides are available at: https://dvs.atavist.com/tech-forum-2015 Presented by Derrick Schultz (Atavist) at Tech Forum 2015 / BookNet Canada / March 12, 2015 booknetcanada.ca/technology-forum

Drawing on their extensive history with the middle school market, Melanie Jeffs from Orca Book Publishers will examine how engagement, not only with customers but with staff and authors, can inform content generation as well as lead to successful marketing strategies that result in increased print and digital sales. Slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/booknetcanada/engaging-everyone-a-case-study-from-orca-book-publishers-tech-forum-2015-melanie-jeffs Presented by Melanie Jeffs (Orca Book Publishers) at Tech Forum 2015 / BookNet Canada / March 12, 2015 booknetcanada.ca/technology-forum