Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

John Battelle wrote a post at the end of August entitled Give Me Your Data, Said the Spider to the Fly. Although it’s about search and advertising, there are some valuable lessons for publishing and books.

In particular, it talks about the advantage Google got by running search for lots of portals -

And in the end, isn’t data what it’s all about? Remember what happened with search? AOL, Netscape, Yahoo, and many others fed the Google search beast until Google had all the data and therefore the best search engine. When it came time for renegotiation of those search deals, who had the upper hand?

It’s all about the data, to my mind.

The question that brings up is – What data is important in Publishing and who has access to it? 

What types of Data are valuable to Publishing?

 There are actually lots of important pieces of data, including

1. Book Sales Data.
2. Customer Buying Patterns.
3. Data on who the most valuable customers are.
4. Used book sales numbers and their impact on sales of new books.
5. How Sales vary with Book Prices.
6. The actual costs of book publishing.

Basically anything that helps understand customers better, increases sales, or predicts the success of a book is very valuable data.

Any publisher or store with a lot more data than other publishers and stores has a big competitive advantage.

Who currently has this data?

 At the moment, the most valuable publishing data is scattered i.e.

1. Data on costs, book sales and what determines success and failure lies with Publishers. 
2. Data on customer behavior, book sales, impact of deals, and other buying patterns lies with Book Stores. 
3. Data on popular books, what customers lend out, and for how long, lies with Libraries.  

And so forth.

There is some data that is just not available i.e.

1. How much of a book do people actually read? 
2. How many people actually read a book – how often is a book sold or given to someone else?
3. What happens when you change the price by $1?

Ebooks allow for lots of little tweaks that just aren’t possible with physical books. These tweaks allow for collecting a lot of valuable data.  

As Publishing evolves who will have the best data?

Ebook Reader companies, especially ones with their own eBook Stores like Amazon and Sony, are going to have access to all existing data and lots of new, rich data. 

What’s amazing is that not only will they get all of this data in one place (as opposed to having it split between distributors, sellers, etc.) they will also have data that just wasn’t present earlier.

The big changes in data are along quite a few important dimensions -

1. All the traditional publishing data is available to one company.
2. There is a ton of data available – much more than before.  
3. There is a lot of new data available.
4. All of this data is available in almost real time.

You have to look at all these new capabilities and wonder …

How much of an advantage does this data give the owner?

Having access to ten times more data, including data no other company has, and in near real time is a huge advantage by itself.

However, what really makes things unfair is that you can act on this rich, actionable data quickly and cheaply i.e.

1. You can reprice ebooks instantly. 
2. You can recommend new ebooks based on user choices. 
3. You can change sales strategy based on how a book is doing.
4. You can instantly change what book gets promoted.

Basically, you can tweak and test a hundred (or a million) different strategies and figure out what books are going to succeed, how to get the most sales out of them, and you can do all of this at very, very low cost.

Where does that leave Publishing?

There’s no easy answer.

1. We suddenly have companies with the sort of data advantage never seen before in publishing.
2. We suddenly have companies with the sort of execution time advantage never seen before in publishing.

Amazon and Sony are not only going to have a huge data advantage, they are also going to have the mechanisms to put data into action faster than anyone else.

Filed under: kindle, publishing Tagged: | future of publishing, new publishing