Friday, June 15, 2007

YOU TUBE your Book!

Simon and Schuster is (to my knowledge) the first large publishing house using You Tube to promote their books.

They actually set up a .tv channel, (check it out) in addition to a whole subscription channel on You Tube. My feeling is that this is a great example of cross media promotion, that can really work (I got hooked already into a couple of their books, just watching a well done 2mts video).

Easy to produce, direct, eye catching; no doubts video is becoming the media for promotion in our days.

Go S&S! They are leading the way also ahead of the usual suspects (Amazon, Amazon and Amazon).

Thursday, June 7, 2007

The Espresso Book Machine. Sugar for you?

A number of different sources reported about the new "Espresso Book Machine". The machine was showcased at the BEA conference in NYC which I attended last week. According to the sources:

The new machine as a technological innovation promises to revolutionize how we buy books. It allows printing and binding a single copy of a book at the point of demand without human interactions. Buying a book will eventually be very similar to getting cash from an ATM. You choose a title, insert a credit card to pay for the book -- and walk away with the finished book a few minutes later. On a global scale this would eliminate shipping and warehousing costs for books (thereby also eliminating returns and pulping of unsold books) and allow simultaneous global availability of new books. POD offers the opportunity to deliver development knowledge and content to students, practitioners, media, and simply interested individuals in a way they could not be reached before.

The articles report that the machine, which is intended for use in bookstores, libraries and other retail outlets, will sell for less than $100,000 and that currently has access to over 200,000 out-of-copyright books through the Open Content Alliance, a number of Arabic-language books from the Library of Alexandria and 2,200 World Bank titles (!).

Here are some sources: Publisher Weekly, CNN Money, the World Bank (!)
Here's a video of how it works.

It's been defined as "the future of the book". It sounds familiar, doesn't it. Let's bet: how many years before finding some similar at Walmart or El Corte Ingles or La Rinascente?