e-Relevant

Random House Struik has launched the eGuide to Mammals of Southern Africa mobile app

anthonyb@nhpsa.co.za (Anthony Booysen) — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 12:25:23 GMT

Random House Struik has launched the eGuide to Mammals of Southern Africa mobile app.

A new Natural History app, eGuide to Mammals of Southern Africa comes shortly after the release of another bestseller app Sasol eBirds of Southern Africa.

eGuide to Mammals is based on Struik Nature’s Field Guide to Mammals of Southern Africa, and offers interactive features that will enrich your wildlife experience.

App Features include:

Each of the over 350 species found in the region has a detailed text description
Most species have multiple hi-res photographs, distribution maps, animal-human size comparison, spoor drawings and skull photographs
A few of the species also have audible calls
Quickly find a species by looking up its track type, grouped with similar tracks
A compare feature that lets you view two species at the same time on the same screen
The ability to easily find a species using either common or scientific names and in taxonomic or alphabetic order
A personal record of mammal sightings that can be exported to your storage card or email
Read more...

Amazon’s pursuit for same day deliveries, or why would you ever go back to a physical store?

julial@nhpsa.co.za (Julia Lhuillery-Moulder) — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 14:01:36 GMT

Amazon has long played with tax loopholes in the US.

The "use tax" is to be paid by the purchaser either directly to the seller or to the tax administration. It represents roughly between 8 and 10% of each sale depending on the US State you live in. As an example, on a $100 sale the purchaser would need to pay an additional $10, making the bill $110.

In the past Amazon didn't charge their customers the tax and has been subject to various federal law suits. Their reasoning was inspired from a 1992 Supreme Court ruling stating that companies are only required to collect sales taxes from their customers when they have a presence in the state in which they reside. In Amazon's case, customers would be required to pay taxes where Amazon has set physical operations and warehouses. If you live in a state where Amazon has no physical facilities, you wouldn't pay the sales tax on purchases, giving Amazon the chance to be more competitive on prices compared to other national retailers.

Recently Amazon capitulated and began collecting tax money from their customers. Their reason? A change in strategy. Amazon's approach has always been to set up their distribution centres in low-cost states to deliver to high-cost rich states. For instance an order would be shipped to California from a warehouse in Kentucky.

Kobo – Expanding and innovating

marks@nhpsa.co.za (Mark Seabrook) — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 13:53:44 GMT

Kobo is moving firmly into the number two position in international e-book retail (no prizes for guessing who is in first place), and being acquired by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten has added the financial muscle to accelerate this move.

Over the last year Kobo has launched local offerings in the UK, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, and in July they entered two more major markets.

In conjunction with its parent company (Rakuten) Kobo launched its full e-reading offering in Japan on the 19^th July. This includes a fully localized Japanese experience including popular Japanese content (novels, essays, business and comic books) and authors in local currency.

In Italy Kobo has partnered with the Mondadori Group, Italy’s largest book retailer and publisher. The Kobo touch device will be available in 400 of Mondadori’s stores, and the publisher will also make 4,000 of its titles available to the overall 30,000 Italian e-books. The Italian e-book market is valued at close to 10 million Euro.

Kobo has also announced a self-publishing platform called Kobo Writing Life (KWL), which offers authors a range of tools, including live metrics of how and where their e-books are selling and the ability to manage pricing at a country level. KWL will launch in English, but localized language versions are already on the roadmap.

Kobo launched in December 2009 and now has more than 9 million registered users worldwide and a catalogue of over 2.5 million books, newspapers and magazines. Kobo is focused purely on e-reading and has launched many industry firsts such its social experience which includes Reading Life and Author Notes as well as e-book gifting. Kobo has customers in 190 countries.

Pushing publishing boundaries: Lessons to be learned from Fifty Shades of Grey

silmap@nhpsa.co.za (Silma Parker) — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 11:05:41 GMT

Fifty Shades of Grey, the world's fastest-selling book, was originally a work of fan fiction published for free online. Based on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, Fifty Shades (originally titled Master of the Universe) places ‘Bella’ and ‘Edward’ in a world of sexual submission and dominance, and has profited hugely from it.

Author EL James published the story in installments on FanFiction.net and received feedback and suggestions from fellow fan fiction authors, slowly building up a huge following of readers and fans [some might say ‘co-producers’] in the process. Fanfiction.net, the biggest online fan fiction community, has over 2.2 million members. The most popular ‘Fandom’ by far is Harry Potter, with almost 500 000 fan fiction stories.

James is not the first fan fiction author to successfully go ‘pro’. Among the list of commercially published fan fiction authors are Naomi Novik (Peter Jackson has signed on do the film version of her Temeraire series), Sarah Res Brennan (The Demon's Lexicon) and Meg Cabot (The Princess Diaries).

In a blog post titled “Is Fan Fiction Ready to Go Mainstream?“ Alma Katsu makes the point that “While it is difficult to imagine another fan fiction-based book duplicating Fifty Shades’ heady success, it would be naïve to think that … others won’t try to follow in James’ footsteps.” Fanfic authors seem to agree: “If James can do it, what's to say the rest of us fanfic writers out there can't either, so long as we aren't blatantly plagiarizing someone else’s work?”.

Pinterest: Marketing in South Africa

silmap@nhpsa.co.za (Silma Parker) — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 06:42:25 GMT

Takeaways

Pinterest is the ‘hot new thing’ in social media
It is the 20th most popular website in South Africa
It drives more traffic back to websites than Google Plus, LinkedIn and YouTube combined.
High-quality compelling images get the best repin results

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is an image-driven social media tool that lets users gather and categorise images and videos into visual pinboards. Users can collect and organise images of whatever interests them, and, whenever they pin something, their followers will see it and can ‘repin’ the image if they like it. There is also functionality for ‘liking’ and commenting on pins.

Who uses Pinterest?

According to Alexa, in relation to overall Internet usage, Pinterest users are more likely to be 25-34 year old childless Caucasian females who are college educated. Pinterest visitors view 8.4 unique pages each day on average.

How does it rate in South Africa?

Pinterest is the 20th most visited website in South Africa, with over 11 million views per week. 1.1% of all Pinterest visitors are from South Africa, although usage in other African countries is not as high.

E-Book Sales Increase by 333% for US Publishers in 2011

julial@nhpsa.co.za (Julia Lhuillery-Moulder) — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 11:10:01 GMT

US publishers can be pleased with their reach in territories outside the US. According to a report released from the Association of American Publishers, e-books sold in foreign countries reached $21.5 million in 2011, from $4.9 million in 2010 - representing a 333% increase. Traditionally, foreign distributors in non-English speaking countries offered only 5% to 10% of US publishers' English-language titles.

The report states that US publishers work with "nearly 15 000 international retailers in 200 countries" and export 90% of their books to 750 million English readers outside the US.

Most popular were pop culture and business books, but also children's and young adult books in countries where people are keen to learn English. "English language education has reached into increasingly younger demographics," explains Lorraine Shanley, president of Market Partners International, a publishing consulting firm. "The expectation is we'll see the trajectory for English language book and e-book sales continue to go up."

Three factors have influenced the spike in e-book sales:

the growth in new local and regional retailers – among them TxtR in Germany, OLF in Switzerland…

a greater number of tablets sold

the expansion of leading US book vendors (Apple, Amazon, Kobo, etc) into international markets.

According to Seth Russo, Vice-President, Director of International Sales at Simon & Schuster, "the international market isn't necessarily going to be dominated by multi-nationals. Other, smaller regional players will be able to carve out their own niche in the e-book market."

However the market leaders, Amazon and Apple, are dominating all markets, USA included. In 2011, Amazon - already dominating the US and UK - opened branches in Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Barnes & Noble aspires to international reach and recently opened Nook offices in the UK and Berlin. Kobo, though small internationally, has concluded agreements with local booksellers in Europe and holds now a larger market share outside the US than within it.

According to Russo, the international market is far from being settled and even "the established players are still emerging."

In the US, e-book sales are still growing but at a slower pace. E-book revenue in February 2012 reached $122.5 million in the US, a 25.9% increase compared to February 2011. US e-book sales are set to reach $1.5 billion in 2012.

Waterstones & Amazon – Dancing with the devil

marks@nhpsa.co.za (Mark Seabrook) — Wed, 30 May 2012 07:22:26 GMT

At the London Book Fair this year one of the most talked about announcements was the one which never took place, a partnership between Waterstones and Barnes & Noble.

With Amazon, Kobo, Apple and even Google expanding their e-book offering internationally Barnes & Noble is behind the game, and Waterstones, who many years back helped launch the first wave of e-books in the UK with Sony, is now looking anything but e-book focused. Waterstones and the Nook (Barnes & Noble’s e-reader) partnering in the UK looked to all to be the perfect marriage.

Barnes & Noble’s CEO, William Lynch, had signalled intentions of expanding the Nook internationally and they had begun engaging with app developers and publishers outside the US. There was plenty of speculation in the press that a Waterstones/Barnes & Noble deal was on the horizon and the London Book Fair seemed the obvious event for such an announcement. Not a word.

As the London Book Fair drew to a close and in the weeks that followed the general assumption was that these are complex deals and the lawyers are making some money. Than just over a month later on the 21^st May an announcement came completely out of left field: A Waterstones and Amazon partnership.

Harry Potter e-books available, but only through Pottermore

marks@nhpsa.co.za (Mark Seabrook) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 21:05:08 GMT

It’s quite amazing that for the first time since the Harry Potter series began, in 1997, official e-book versions of all seven titles in the series are now available. Far more amazing however is where and how these e-books are being sold.

For the first time in the history of digital publishing a major author has forced the likes of Amazon and Barnes & Noble to operate on their terms. These and other retailers are referring readers to the Pottermore shop (the online business created to sell the e-books), rather than selling the e-books directly.

The customer can discover the Harry Potter e-books via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other major e-book retailers and is then re-directed to Pottermore to complete the purchasing of the e-book which can still be read on the customer’s device of choice (including the Kindle). It’s the first time Amazon has allowed a 3^rd party to own the customer relationship, while still allowing the e-book to be delivered to its device.

Mike Shatzkin – whose blog everyone interested in digital publishing should be following - has commented on how important Rowling and Pottermore's move is.

Bilbary and Jelly Books

marks@nhpsa.co.za (Mark Seabrook) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 21:01:31 GMT

In the last week two new e-book related startups launched that look to change the buying, browsing and selling experience. Both Bilbary and Jellybooks have founders with UK-based book publishing backgrounds. Bilbary was founded by formed Waterstones MD Tim Coates and Jellybooks by Andrew Rhomberg, previously director of content acquisition at Txtr.

Bilbary focuses on selling e-books direct to readers, something which big trade publishers need a lot of help with. Currently in beta the site is available in the US and has over 300,000 e-books available for sales from non-agency publishers. Another 100,000 agency titles will be added shortly, and then the site will expand to titles form international publishers, self-published and out-of-print books. Future plans are to expand to an e-book rental model, which could help publishers compete with Amazon.

Currently Jellybooks main focus is on book discovery. The website is simple and displays rows of book covers in an easy to browse manner similar to a bookstore, except here all covers are ‘face out’. Customers are able to read the first 10 percent of the book, DRM-free, and can share the sample across various social networking platforms. The business model behind Jellybooks is a group buying heavily discounted model; this is not available yet but will be rolled out in a future release. At this stage Jellybooks has no intention of selling e-books directly at retail prices. Its focus is on being an e-book showroom where customers discover e-books and can buy them (via links on Jellybooks) at various retailers, except for the special group buying deals on Jellybooks.

The Hunger Games: using social media to bring a fictional world to life

silmap@nhpsa.co.za (Silma Parker) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 11:23:15 GMT

Post-apocalyptic teen action movie The Hunger Games raked in a hefty $155 million during its debut weekend. With the third-highest opening weekend in history (behind Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and The Dark Knight), the film, based on Suzanne Collins’s novels, has established itself as the new pop culture phenomenon – one that is only just beginning.

Lionsgate, the studio behind The Hunger Games, strategically planned an immersive social media experience to engage and grow the fan base, a strategy that also increased print book sales from 9 million to 24 million. With the blurring of lines betweens books, e-books, enhanced e-books, apps, and related spin-offs, the book publishing industry is facing increased competition from other entertainment media, particularly when it comes to marketing savvy. Entertainment marketing increasingly thrives online, where engaging with fans and creating something exciting together can result in the snowball effect of word of mouth spread.

The Hunger Games is a great example of using social media creatively to create a buzz around their product. The studio had a team of 21 people and spent a long time exacting their strategy, and the timing of events in their marketing plan. Here is a summary of some of what they did on the various platforms.