Harenberg Kommunikation, the publisher behind the trade magazine for the book publishing industry in the german speaking markets ’Buchreport’, is investing in ebook analytics and market research. That’s the field of Publishing Data Networks, the company that now has been founded together with Markus Baer, former CTO of the German library aggregator DiViBib, and Sebastian Posth.

In 2007, Posth founded ‘Zentrale Medien’, the first digital distributor and ebook conversion house in Germany, which was acquired by KNO-VA (Koch, Neff, Oetinger) in 2009. After that, until 2011 Posth was Director Digital Content Distribution at arvato media (Bertelsmann). Since then, Posth has been working as a publishing consultant for publishers, intermediaries and retailers, and starting-up Publishing Data Networks with its first project called ‘Monitor’.

‘Monitor’ provides reporting and analytics of ebook sales trends and other market data to authors, publishers and ebook stores. Current sales trends of ebooks across all stores will be presented to authors and publishers in an integrated monitoring platform. Furthermore, marketing data from social media platforms, blogs as well as reviews and other usage data will be collected in order to provide a feedback to authors and publishers and improve the understanding of the digital traction of ebooks (and books) online.

More information on ‘Monitor’ you can find in the following post: “What Is A Trade Impact Factor“.

Also see the news covered in Buchreport online: http://www.buchreport.de/nachrichten/verlage/verlage_nachricht/datum/2013/05/03/publishing-data-networks-am-start.htm

At the 2013 IfBookThen Conference in Milan I gave a presentation about ‚bookish data‘, and I will try to convert my ideas into this blog post. In order to provoke a debate about open and shared data in publishing and the importance of data analysis and data driven retail marketing and distribution, I introduced what I would like to call the ‚Trade Impact Factor‘. It represents one of the key concepts of my new venture and its first product called ‚Monitor‘, a tool for sales and marketing data analysis designed for publishers and authors.

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The operative business of the publishing industry is undergoing a fundamental shift. Digital distribution and social media marketing are mere keywords of a massively changing environment. New ways of marketing content and approaching the reader are major challenges. Experiments can be useful, if publishers take the effort to learn from the results of their experiments. Important decisions need to be based on data analysis rather than on intuition. (Speaking of) Amazon, for example, can be considered the prototype of a successful, data-driven retailer in publishing exactly because of their radical focus on data analysis – and the actions that consequently follow it. Publishers can learn a lot from Amazon, although it might require a change in attitude, mentality and self-understanding, which is not always easy to achieve. Perhaps publishers will eventually become professionals in data analysis, if they aren’t already. Don’t underestimate publishers! The industry, the industry has recognized and acknowledged the crucial role of data analysis – and my new venture will offer the necessary tools.

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Publishers have access to a lot of data, already. Much more additional information and data can be found on the web or will be available in the future – via API’s, which will obviously be offered by various companies, retailers, platforms, services, that will make a business out of it. Combined and analysed properly, these data can improve marketing and sales of books and ebooks or help to drive product innovation.

Let me present to you a short and non-complete list of different data which could be used for a smart analysis:

Monthly Sales Reports

Printbook orders as well as actual book sales are properly reported back to publishers on a daily basis for some time now. The analytic tools, which are offered by major distributors and market research companies, are quite impressive. When it comes to ebooks (which is the focus, here), publishers receive title related sales reports from the retailers only on a monthly basis. This seems sufficient to me, as the sales reports are mainly used for accounting purposes and royalty settlement with the authors. But for marketing and distribution purposes, the frequency of monthly sales reports clearly is not sufficient.

Daily Sales Trends

More and more retailers or distributors (at least in Germany) have improved their reporting and will be delivering sales trends back to publishers on a daily basis or even, yes, in ‚real time‘. Apple has introduced this positive development to ebook publishing, a knowledge transfer from the audio distribution business, which is appreciated very much. With a derivative of EDItX, the German ebook market has agreed on a standard for the exchange of monthly sales reports as well as daily sales trends. Well done.

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But not only sales data should be taken into account for analytics of the ebook market. In fact, sales figures can be pretty reluctant, refusing to tell publishers the story of their genesis. To assess the relevance and dynamics of a title correctly, publishers better have a look at the trend indicators and context parameters that accompany their sales data as well.

Reviews

Reviews on news and magazine websites or professional and even non-professional blogs can be quite important for book and ebook publishers alike. They need to be tracked by publishers, because – depending on the relevance of the author, blog or magazine – the opinion represented in a review can have a crucial influence on future sales – and on further reviews, just like customer reviews.

Customer Reviews

Customer reviews in shops, on review sites like Goodreads, Lovelybooks or social reading platforms like Readmill, provide a very detailed user feedback. They are a great way for authors and publishers to receive a proper feedback to their work. In most cases the contents of the reviews are accompanied, ‚summarized‘, by a more or less standardized (five star) rating, which helps to aggregate this kind of feedback automatically.

User Behavior

Imagine libraries and library aggregators providing the numbers of digital library lendings. Despite current friction between publishers and libraries, the transfer of lending data is just a matter of time. Especially as subscriptions services for ebooks (the natural competitors of libraries) will be making a virtue and business out of user analysis.

Sales Ranks And Topseller Lists

Authors and publishers staring at sales ranks and topseller lists.

Social Buzz

Data from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ can be far more than just an alerting service for publishers! Of course it is interesting to keep track of the number of interactions, likes and shares across the various profiles. In the future, mentions and comments will be analysed in more detail by what is called: Sentiment analysis.

Ecommerce

Ebook shops are in an advantageous position compared to publishers, as they control the customer and might not always be willing or legally allowed to share the data they have. But publishers do invest in their own stores and retail non the least in order to learn more about their customer. Very soon, ‚cooperation in data exchange‘ might even be an asset for retailers and platforms to compete in the market.

However, it will be interesting to have a look at the information: How customers were directed to the shops and titles, whether reading samples provoke up-selling, what customers buy the content, and what other products they might be interested in.

Authors And Publishers

Does anyone have an idea about the relevance of the number of Twitter followers, Facebook friends or subscribers of authors and publishers? What do peaks in traffic of their websites, social media accounts and fan pages mean?

Marketing Activities

It would be even more interesting to track marketing-, social-media campaigns or promotions. There seems to be a whole industry grounded on the fact that the feedback to these kind of activities can not be followed properly and marketing success can hardly be analysed.

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Trade Impact Factor

The real challenge when dealing with loads of data (apart from getting ahold of them) is to make sure to deal with them in the right way. It certainly does not make any sense to merely present in a user interface all data that possibly can be collected. With Monitor, we would like to encourage publishers to ask the right questions first, so that the reporting can match the actual needs, and provide the right answers.

In addition to the creation of a useful reporting tool, one of our most challenging aims will be to conceive a measure for trending titles and their social impact! What is happening around the titles? Did marketing efforts succeed? We are convinced that it is important not only to keep track of daily sales figures. What if you had 50.000 downloads of an ebook as a result of a promotion, but no one reading the book? What if you had more social buzz than actual sales?

With Monitor, publishers can use the actual sales data and connect them with relevant context information to find out more about the background story of the numbers. For this we would like to create a measure called: The Trade Impact Factor.

The Trade Impact Factor will be able to reflect all the mentions, reviews, posts, citations, likes, shares, lendings, streams, subscriptions, downloads and sales. And certainly, the Trade Impact Factor must be considered a proposal for a debate on data analysis, which hopefully will create some feedback. Be assured that it will be a quite interesting proposal.

Mutual Exchange Of Data

Interestingly, many questions that have been raised above are not only posed by publishers but also by retailers. When it comes to marketing, publishers and retailers depend on each other. Retailers know their own customers via the platforms and accounts they control. But are they able to keep track of the relevant impact factors that provoke sales? Publishers start to learn more about their readers via blogs, fan pages, social media accounts, too – plus they coordinate marketing efforts, schedules and budgets.

With Monitor, not only publishers will get access to a lot of data, but also retailers. It is one of our company’s major goals to create an infrastructure for the mutual exchange of data between publishers and retailers in order to optimize data driven retail marketing and distribution.

In this network of publishing data, shops will provide sales trends and other data back to publishers. Publishers will provide data on the ,trade impact’ of their titles to shops, so that retailers will be able to compare title sales on their own platform with the attention for certain titles in the market.

There is a strong interrelation between marketing and promotion by the publishers and front page placements, newsletters, recommendation lists of the retailers. When both go hand in hand, supported by a timely exchange of data between both, this will benefit sales for publishers and retailers alike.

tl | dr

There is new ebook start-up company based in Berlin, who is offering big data monitoring and analysis for publishers and retailers, and will be creating a measure for trending titles called the ‚Trade Impact Factor’.

It has been frequently noted that with digital publishing there is a significant opportunity for publishers to translate e-book editions into foreign languages in-house in order to distribute and sell them internationally. In June, Bastei Lübbe, one of Germany’s top trade publishers, began offering Apocalypsis — a bestselling German serialized digital-first publication — in the US and UK markets. It is a milestone move for the company and truly remarkable in many ways, which I’ll explain.

In the past several years Bastei Lübbe has gone through a significant change, moving from Bergisch-Gladbach to Cologne, and transitioning from a publisher of mass market dime novels into one of the top addresses for digital innovation in German publishing. And it did so without sacrificing its roots, but rather by transforming them.

Within these few years Bastei Lübbe has become a media company that not only preaches the cross-media exploitation of content, but also executes. Non-book and merchandising have become an important part of the publishing business, and departments for crossmedia marketing were established in order to license content and rights for TV, movie, and game production.

Moving to In-House Digital Development

E-books, naturally, have become a top priority. Going back two years, Bastei Lübbe established Bastei Entertainment, a stand-along department responsible for the creation and editing of e-books and focusing on the marketing and distribution of digital content, the majority of it created in-house.

With Bastei Entertainment conceiving and creating new content, capital investment was needed, and Lübbe successfully offered 30 million euros in public corporate bonds with an annual interest rate of 6.75% and a term of five years. Seventy-five percent of the bonds were acquired by institutional investors and asset managers, and twenty-five percent by private investors (read more here) — quite a unique scenario in German publishing.

In this institutional context, the company developed Apocalypsis, a digital multimedia web novel that served as a lighthouse project. And its immediate success (considering the nascent e-book market in Germany) — with the prologue downloaded 100,000 times, and weekly downloads of about 2,000 copies more — proves Lübbe right.

Apocalypsis is a genre title, and its story is inspired by one of Bastei Lübbe’s best selling paperback titles of recent years. You might just recognise the concept…

“Rome, May 2011. After the shocking abdication and disappearance of Pope John Paul III, close confidants of the Pope are being murdered. Peter Adam, a German journalist, and his American colleague, Loretta, begin to investigate the case. Their only lead is a book about mystical symbols predicting an unsettling event which is to take place in ten days’ time.”

But here I would like to focus on the way the title was published rather than on its content. Apocalypsis is a “digital first” publication, composed as a web-novel, structured in seasons with 12 episodes, each about 60 “pages” long, published in weekly instalments.

Apocalypsis was designed and developed for digital devices. Every episode was published simultaneously as an e-book and an e-book-app, containing multimedia material and audio. In the English-language markets these are priced $1.99 USD and 1.59 GBP for single episodes, or $18.99 USD and 13.49 GBP for the whole season; the opening episode can be downloaded for free. The story currently up to episode 8 in English-language editions is available via the iBookstore or Barnesandnoble.com.

How It Was Done, Lessons Learned

One can truly call it a challenge not only to write and produce the e-book formats and apps, but also to market the different editions with its media enhancements and different price structures. Lübbe gained experience from it accordingly.

Apocalypsis was not written by a traditional author, but by the screenwriter Mario Giordano, who has–in addition to children books — also written screenplays for Germany’s most popular “Tatort” crime series. Interestingly, in the case of Apocalypsis the author did not come to the company with the story. Rather, it happened the other way round: the idea for Apocalypsis was conceived in-house by Bastei Entertainment who then sought out an author capable of “interactive storytelling.” After he was hired, Giordano wrote the text in collaboration and in weekly sessions with app programmers and audio designers to ensure a compact and interactive multimedia experience.

In my opinion, this is an exceptional and exemplary way of writing stories in the future!

Apocalypsis was released in Germany at the end of 2011 and immediately offered some new lessons, not the least of which was showing how, each new weekly publication upon entering the download bestseller charts, recommendation lists, or genre pages of the various e-book stores, was leading readers back to the previous episodes. Users happening upon, say, the third episode, might get curious and start downloading the initial episode, thus becoming a convert to the whole series. This way, Apocalypsis has managed to sustain the attention of the audience for more than twelve weeks, something not likely to happen with single e-book publications that usually have a very short attention peak. In general, Apocalypsis teaches publishers various lessons for e-book marketing. It surely was an advantage for Lübbe that they learned and executed fast. In addition, although the title was primarily conceived and marketed digitally, the paperback edition went on to sell 60,000 copies.

Translating and Selling It Abroad

The investment in the project has been enormous. Despite the fact that the German e-book market is growing fast, it is still running two, maybe three years behind the US market. The market share of e-books compared to the overall book market is 1%, compared to approximately 20% in the US and 8% in the UK. In order to cover the costs, Lübbe decided to invest additional money and translate Apocalypsis right from the beginning, with a plan to publish it in the US and UK markets. What’s more, Lübbe will be releasing a Mandarin (Chinese) and a Spanish version of Apocalypsis soon.

Different approaches for different markets! Whereas the English version was translated in-house and distributed by Bastei Lübbe themselves, the Spanish and Mandarin version will be translated abroad and marketed internationally as a joint venture together with local publishing, distribution and retail marketing partners in Spain and China.

By doing so, Bastei Lübbe has demonstrated that there are alternative ways to distribute content to foreign countries apart from simply licensing it to publishers abroad. It will be interesting to learn, which way will be the most successful in a growing international e-publishing ecosystem.

(The post was originally published via www.publishingperspectives.com and edited by Ed Nawotka. Thanks!)

Today, the latest survey on the German ebook market has been published by the German Publishers & Booksellers Association with GfK Panel Services Germany. 410 booksellers and 348 publishers as well as 10.000 individuals have been questioned. You can download the results of the survey here: “Markt mit Perspektiven – das E-Book in Deutschland 2011” (PDF, German). The press release (also in German) and other numbers can be found here: “Aufbruch oder Umbruch? Der deutsche Buchmarkt und das E-Book”.

The key findings of the survey – among other interesting data on the German market and future perspectives for publishers and booksellers – are:

- In average, in Germany in 2011 ebooks have made 6,2% of the publishers’ overall revenues, compared to 5,4% in 2010. For 2015 publishers expect an ebook revenue share of 17%!

- The overall ebook market share in Germany in 2011 has been 1%, compared to 0,5% in 2010.

- 49% of German publishers have sold ebooks in 2011, which is a plus of 15% compared to 2010. 90% of the publishers will be publishing digitally in the future. From those publishers, who already offer ebooks, 42% of all new titles are also published in ebook formats. In average, in 2011 German publishers offered 162 ebooks. 85% of all publishers are convinced, that EPUB will become the most important format for them!

- The average retail price (incl. 19% VAT) of German ebooks in 2011 has been 8,07 EUR, compared to 10,40 EUR in 2010. 4,7 Million ebooks have been sold in 2011, compared to 2,0 Million in 2010, which sums up to 38 Million EUR ebook revenues in 2011 (according to Buchreport.de). The number of ebook buyers increased from 540.000 in 2010 to 757.000 in 2011. The relevance of dedicated ebook reading devices is supposed to increase in 2012.

- It is expected, that the revenues of German booksellers (“klassischer Buchhandel”) will decrease 16% by 2015 “due to ebook publishing”.

All numbers and data of the German book market will also be published in August under the title: „Buch und Buchhandel in Zahlen 2012“! I can only recommend to have a look at it, if you are interested in the German book market!

Have a look at this wonderful, handmade piece! This towel has been made especially for this blog. It will surely clean my thoughts and perspectives.

Thanks Franzi!

Well, blogging needs a beginning. And this is it, obviously taking some of the texts, that I have written and presented over the last years being involved in ebooks and digital publishing, putting them online, here, assembled. Some of them outdated, which makes it so obvious for me, that change does not make halt even in front of game changing innovations!

Hey, publishing! Innovation and change will not make halt, even not in front of you, telling everyone (who is not at all interested in listening to you), how important reading and education is for everyone or for society or for culture or the future of mankind! I am with you, although I might be one of the few!

A historical perspective is always a very helpful (and I can tell as I have spend months working in the dusty archives of the 17th and 18th Century). I will constantly be asking and irritating myself: What will I think reading my own posts in 10 years? Does it make sense now? Did it make sense then? Am I alienated enough, which I would consider to be a good thing, or am I just embarrassed?

Apropos embarrassing … I will write in German, and I will try to write in ‘Englisch’ as well, often, whenever possible or suitable! But please prepare for the worst English and excuse me for my mistakes! Someone very close to me would not even let me publish any of my ‘proprietary Genglish’ posts to you, but I must not ask her to have a look at anything I expect to write, beforehand. I cannot even thank her enough for everything she did for me over the last years!

Many topics will surely not be interesting for an international audience: Details, debates, companies, constellations in the German ebook market. (We have a bookprice fixing! – You want to learn about bookprice fixing?) I will focus writing posts in English that might be interesting for you, my dear reader!

Why „Publishing hurts“?

We are Zeitzeugen of a shift of paradigm in media, which will violently and vehemently shake and shatter the foundations of a more than two hundred year old business model. For publishers – and I consider myself to be one of them -, it is not always easy to cope with this change and to position themselves in a completely reshaped digital environment.

The move towards ebooks and epublishing can only succeed with effort and sacrifice, which will be painful and still require a passionate involvement at the same time. Ebooks are often the cause of bad mood, insomnia, headaches, even depression, especially when publishers deal with ebooks because “they have to.“

On the other hand, there is so much passion, love, lust, energy – pathos in publishing! These are Nietzschean dimensions! It is a wonderful suffering, this digital publishing! Publishing hurts!

In no other industry you will find people with more inspiration, vivacity, wit, love, lust, passion and affirmation for what they are doing. And this ‚passionate digital publishing‘ is what I personally care of, what drives me as a publisher and service provider, and what will hopefully influence and determine the posts of this blog!

Businesswise, have a look at my LinkedIn page. Currently, I am available for advice, support, consulting and strategic business development in the fields of ebooks, digital distribution and ebook retail marketing. I can offer project management with expertise in implementation, might be able to bring good people and good companies together. I would also be open for an international commitment.

You can reach me via email, by phone or via Twitter.

E-mail address: s.posth [a t] googlemail.com
Mobile: +49 170 201 7001
Twitter: @sposth

This week, Germany’s first ebook subscription service has been launched. It’s called Skoobe (www.skoobe.de) and it might have the potential to turn the ebook business from right to left.

Some months ago, Skoobe launched an app for iOS devices, that provides reading samples of current bestsellers from more than 70 publishers (among them publishing houses like Droemer, DVA, Fischer, Goldmann, Heyne, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Lübbe, Luchterhand and Rowohlt). That already raised speculations in the German market that were confirmed on Wednesday. From now on, via the same app users are able to access the full text of a couple of thousand ebooks for a monthly subscription rate of 9,99 EUR.

Skoobe is designed as a „virtual library“. This means, that users can browse the whole assortment and borrow all ebooks as long and as often as they want. Only the number of ebooks that can be borrowed at the same time as well as the number of new ebooks per month are limited. Five ebooks at the same time are available on the user’s bookshelf, when „returning“ one, another title can be borrowed. The first 10.000 users of the app are able to access an unlimited number of new titles, from March 2013 the offer will be limited to two new titles per month! The app allows for offline reading for a period of 30 days. Every ebooks is available to every user all the same time. So, there is no „waiting list“ for popular ebooks, which might even make Skoobe a competitor to lending services of public libraries in the German market.

Skoobe is available in the Appstore for all users based in the EU or Switzerland. But currently, there are only German language titles available! An Android version is to be launched, soon.

But above all specifications and features for users – the app is superprofessionally designed and runs very smoothly -, there is another remarkable thing to mention about the company: Skoobe is a joint venture of the two German major trade publishing companies Verlagsgruppe Random House and Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck plus arvato – arvato Publishers Services. This means, that Skoobe will be backed up with loads of trade content right from the start! And, it’s open to other publishers as well, due to which Skoobe is able to offer ebooks also from one of the most innovative trade publishers in the German ebook market, Bastei Lübbe. Which will probably attract even more publishers!

Skoobe is the publishers’ reaction to readers demand for popular ebook content going hand in hand with state-of-the-art reading services. Consequently Skoobe’s CEO Christian Damke explains: „In developing Skoobe, we have tried to understand the special needs of ebook readers better […]. In collaboration with our readers, we will continuously improve Skoobe to provide the best reading experience on smartphones and tablets.”

Publishers, certainly the big trade publishers, might have been underrated in their ability to apply to a radically changing market. They obviously realized, that changes in the digital market will happen; the trend towards subscription based services rather than stand-alone download is just one of them. And it’s a good sign for publishing that the publishers themselves embrace it with a rather courageous step like the launch of Skoobe. In any case, it must be considered a clever strategic move of Bertelsmann and Holtzbrinck to offer this kind of service now, and in this particular constellation as a joint force.

(Dieser Artikel erschien am 5. März 2012 auf Futurebook.net - a Digital Blog From Europe in Association With The Bookseller.)

For the O’Reilly radar blog I have been interviewed by Jenn Webb. Have a look at The digital rights quagmire. Sebastian Posth on the complexity of digital publishing rights. Jenn introduced the interview as following:

“Digital publishing brings to light a number of new challenges and areas of uncertainty for everyone, from publishers to authors to retail consumers. Sebastian Posth (@sposth), a speaker at TOC Frankfurt, discusses some of these issues in the following interview. He outlines questions raised in the digital rights and distribution arenas and talks about why the waters have become so muddied.”

You can read the full interview, here …