Booknet Canada

This month we're looking back at our biggest book-publishing-meets-technology conference ever. From March 21-23, 2018, hundreds of professionals from across the industry, from ebook developers to librarians, converged in Toronto for Tech Forum and ebookcraft to share, learn, and debate the future of the industry. We've put together a highlight reel from some of our favourite talks (though they were all amazing), with insights on topics like metadata for ebooks, how retailers are bridging the digital divide, some great moments from our women in publishing panel, and lots more. Talks highlighted: 1:00 - Dave Cramer (Hachette), "Jiminy and Dave's Excellent CSS Adventure" 2:30 - Rose Donohoo (OverDrive), "Oh the Places Ebooks Go! An ebook's journey from creation to circulation" 3:30 - Noah Genner (BookNet Canada), "How We Read Digitally: ebookcraft 2018 research study" 4:25 - Monique Mongeon (BookNet Canada), "How We Read Digitally: ebookcraft 2018 research study" 5:12 - Ellen Ullman (Life in Code), "Ellen Ullm

From the archives: While still in her undergrad at Dartmouth College, Kaya Thomas developed her first app: We Read Too, a book resource application that showcases a directory of hundreds of children's and young adult fiction books written by and for people of colour, which contains over 600 books and has over 4,000 downloads. Kaya has held software engineering internships at Time Inc. and Intuit working on mobile applications. She was a CODE2040 2015 Fellow and is a technical volunteer mentor for Black Girls Code. For her work in education and technology, Kaya was honoured by Michelle Obama at the 2015 Black Girls Rock Awards. She joins us to talk about her favourite books, breaking into coding, and diversifying the publishing industry.

In this presentation from last year's ebookcraft conference in Toronto, Amanda Karby from Michigan Publishing Services and Kristin Waites from The MIT Press shared the 7 milestones on their roadmap for accessibility, complete with details and examples from their own journeys putting those steps into action at their respective presses. From task forces to audits, they've got practical steps you can start taking today to make sure you're on the road towards producing accessible ebooks. Interested in this year's ebookcraft conference on March 21-22 in Toronto? Learn more and get tickets: http://ebookcraft.booknetcanada.ca

Nastaran Bisheban, VP of Global Technology Delivery at Kobo, talks about their recently-launched audiobook program, their first audiobook original, and their future plans for audio content. And we speak to Book*hug's Hazel Millar about their record label that pairs authors with recording artists, Chaos & Star. Curious about some of the articles we reference? Find them here: LiveMint: http://www.livemint.com/Companies/lObJNigyM1uKpaUB9V0dPJ/Audiobooks-could-be-the-next-big-thing-says-Penguin-Random.html APA stats: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/audio-books/article/73917-audiobooks-posted-double-digit-gains-in-sales-output.html Quartz: https://qz.com/1190281/google-and-apple-are-trying-to-lure-ebook-and-audiobook-readers-away-from-amazon/ TechRadar: http://www.techradar.com/news/youll-soon-be-able-to-buy-ebooks-and-audiobooks-in-walmart Chaos & Star: https://bookthug.ca/chaos-and-star-records/ TF: http://techforum.booknetcanada.ca/sessions/the-future-will-not-be-silent-audio-fi

We're nearing the end of the year and, like pretty much everyone else, feeling reflective about the past 12 months. And since we're BookNet, that includes how the past year has shaped up in terms of the Canadian book market. So this month we have BookNet president and CEO, Noah Genner, as our guest to chat about the state of the market, the biggest books of the year, the biggest shakeups in the industry, what we can expect for next year, and, of course, lots about Margaret Atwood. Our free webinar on bibliographic standards will be held on Jan. 16 at 1 p.m. ET. Find more info and register here: https://goo.gl/BxvSHv

This month we're talking with Léonicka Valcius about how to interrogate and rethink in-house processes and assumptions when publishing diverse books, including acquisitions, audience identification, setting priorities, and building in-house excitement. Learn more about this topic at Tech Forum 2018: the largest tech-focused professional development event in the Canadian publishing industry. http://techforum.booknetcanada.ca/

Murder, organized crime, and....well, more murder. This month's episode is all about true crime, from recent bestsellers to the evolution of the genre. Featuring authors Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon and Peter Edwards, plus BookNet's Monique Mongeon. Curious about some of the articles we reference? Find them here: NYT: Investigation Discovery Network Makes Crime Pay(https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/05/business/media/investigation-discovery-network-makes-crime-pay.html) Slate: The True Crime Memoir (http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2017/08/the_true_crime_memoir_when_mfa_grads_and_literary_aspirants_write_true_crime.html) Time: Murder shows — The New Soap Opera for Women? (http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/13/why-women-love-murder-shows/) The Hairpin: Why are Women Obsessed with True Crime (https://www.thehairpin.com/2017/05/why-are-women-obsessed-with-true-crime/) Buzzfeed: Scaachi Koul on why being "polite" often gets women killed (https://www.buzzfeed.com/scaachikoul/whats-your-favorite-murder) The Atlantic: How

Second Story Press is serious about keywords. Allie Chenoweth, Marketing & Promotions Coordinator, joins us to talk about their approach on this month's podcast. Links: Demystifying the Inner Workings of Amazon Keywords: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlaZ6xIuRnc Google Ngram: https://books.google.com/ngrams

To help distract us from all our Game of Thrones feelings, we sat down with Evan Munday, children's author and Community Manager at TYPE Books, to discuss the influence of television adaptations on book buying habits of their viewers. Are viewers inclined to head towards bookstores after watching their favourite series? Do television tie-in covers matter? We talk stats, shows, and lots more. Find more details (and fun graphs!) at www.booknetcanada.ca/blog/2017/8/29/page-to-television-a-study-of-adaptations.

To help celebrate Canada's 150th birthday, we sat down with Sue Carter, Editor-in-Chief at Quill & Quire, Canada's magazine for the book publishing industry, to talk about the current state of the publishing landscape and what challenges we're facing. We also discuss some statistics from our most recent research reports, including what book buyers think of Canadian books and who the most well known Canadian author is. And, of course, we speculate on what the book industry might look like in another 50 years.

Micah Bowers, Founder and CEO of Bluefire, was a speaker at ebookcraft 2017. His talk, titled Ebook Apps from the Inside Out, is an exploration of the past, present, and future evolution of ebook reading applications and how that impacts and informs the art and craft of creating ebooks. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

There has lately been a huge surge in demand for audiobooks. This spike has largely been driven by the digital disruption that not only changes how listeners discover audiobooks, but also how they listen to, create, and purchase them. As part of BookNet Canada's Tech Forum 2017 conference, we invited a panel of industry professionals to talk about the audiobook landscape including current trends and future opportunities. Watch the video of this panel here: https://booknetcanada.wistia.com/medias/5amsjka062 Find the slides from Noah Genner's consumer data presentation here: https://www.slideshare.net/booknetcanada/audiobooks-and-the-sound-of-sales-noah-genner-tech-forum-2017

In this panel from Tech Forum 2017, panelists Léonicka Valcius, John Toews, and Tan light discuss how to effectively market and sell diverse book lists. This discussion goes beyond championing diverse books because it's the latest trend to acknowledging it as a business priority. They tackle how to identify the right tools and strategies to get diverse books into the hands of readers, while addressing the obstacles and assumptions that stand in the way of that goal.

When other resources are in short supply, the one thing all publishers always have more than enough of is content. So how do you maximize that resource to help you reach new audiences? As a preview of the panel he'll be joining at our Tech Forum conference on March 24 in Toronto, McSweeney's Jordan Bass joins us on the podcast this month to talk about their approach to repurposing content.

This month in the BookNet Canada podcast we talk with Ashleigh Gardner, Head of Partnerships at Wattpad about the evolution of Wattpad as a company, their models for monetizing content, and some of the things Wattpad has learned from their largest audience - the under 30 set. Ashleigh also talked to us a little bit about Wattpad's newest app, Tap, and it's freemium, candy-crush-like model.

In this mini episode, we run through the bookish highlights of 2016, including the current size of the Canadian book market, industry updates, and new research on consumer buying habits.

In the second part of our series on the print book and why it won't be going away any time soon, we talk with David Sax, the author of the new book, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter. With the recent resurgence of brick-and-mortar bookstores and the plateauing of ebook sales, David sees a bright future ahead for physical books and the people who love them.

Is the print book as a technology underrated? In this month's episode, Joanne McNeish, a professor who studies the resilience of incumbent technologies, discusses why readers prefer print books, the challenges ebooks will have to overcome to be more competitive, and why we shouldn't expect physical books to ever be replaced entirely. Stay tuned for Part 2 in December 2016.

At last year's ebookcraft conference, Teresa Elsey, the Digital Managing Editor of the Trade & Reference Division at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, shared her experiences maintaining backlist ebooks with her team. Besides the technology advances that affect the quality of those earlier conversions, she explained that those backlist ebooks aren't getting any more semantic, aren't getting any more legal, aren't getting any more accurate, and have increasingly irrelevant metadata. In this thought-provoking talk, Teresa discusses the challenges and questions that arise when books turn into software and ebooks don't go away after you've made them. Learn more about ebookcraft: http://ebookcraft.booknetcanada.ca

Publishers opening their own physical bookstores seems to be all the rage these days. We sit down with two Canadian publishers—House of Anansi and Penguin Random House Canada—to talk about their new shops and why they've decided to take the plunge into brick-and-mortar.