Online retailers gather a wealth of data about their customers which offers great potential to optimise sales, to the extent of being able to surmise not only that a customer is pregnant, but the due date.1 A retailer can then offer appropriate products, although the widely-cited story of a father finding out that his daughter […]
Germaine Greer stated on Radio 4 that e-books ‘should cost pennies’1, but is this consumer ideal a realistic possibility? Ms. Greer proffered that digital publishing doesn’t require the bulk of traditional publishing costs, perhaps unaware that printing accounts for 10-15% of book’s price2 or the wider costs of publishing operations, sales and marketing. However, the sentiment […]
Skeuomorphs; the user-interfaces or their icons that borrow from the physical items they’ve rendered obsolete, are arguably applied not only to digital graphical design but structural design of digital publications in the migration from traditional print. A recent article¹ warns that this unwitting approach is prevalent — and narrow-minded: Printed publications are designed to be browsed […]
The recent announcement that eBooks now outsell printed volumes has been interpreted as a pessimistic outlook for the publishing industry¹. But rather than a “death knell”, this is a signal that consumers are ringing in changes to which publishers must rapidly respond; to accept the significant role eBooks play within their offering. Yesterday, Bloomsbury chief […]
A question such as “Would the proposed HS2 rail project represent the best use of government budget?” soon attracts a range of qualitative opinions. Analytical data modelling offers clearer answers around the quantitative results that can be expected and the extent to which problems are solved and created. Further, comprehensively answering the question requires more […]
We are pleased to present a new Case Study to sum up a successful Business Intelligence project we delivered for Addison Lee. Through consultancy and implementation of BOXI 3.1 software, Addison Lee have an efficient reporting infrastructure and leave behind the many drawbacks of manual reporting: Largely the time and resources required to generate reports, […]
The future wasn’t meant to look like this. According to e-book evangelists, freeing the book from its paper format was going to herald a new era of reading. Physical book sales would wither and e-book sales soar as a new generation of reader, converted by the convenience of digital reading, thumbed through Twilight on their […]
Another week, another publishing takeover. Yesterday McGraw Hill announced that it was offloading its education publishing business, though this time not to another publisher. The Private equity arm of investment firm Apollo Global Management will take control of the textbook publisher, which has undershot its revenue targets in 7 of the last 8 quarters and […]
A few months ago I was invited to speak on BBC Radio 4’s flagship consumer affairs show, You and Yours, alongside Professor Nigel Shadbolt, to discuss the government’s Midata scheme proposals The initiative is gaining significant momentum as consumer affairs minister, Jo Swinson, waded in on the debate by threatening to take legal action against […]
Pew Research Center has just released a new research study – Younger Americans’ Reading and Library Habits. It provides a fascinating look at the behaviours of young adults and their attitudes towards reading and libraries. On the face of it, this research may seem to be of little relevance to the UK publishing market, but […]