Cook Partners

Long Tails, Starving Legal Tails, Skinny Pirate's Tails

What impact does illegal file-sharing have on the results predicted by the long tail theory with regard to product sales? A Wired article reports,

“Consumers are ... driven to seek the same music in legal and illegal markets,” reads the report (.PDF), published Thursday by BigChampagne Media Measurement and music rights organization PRS for Music. “The most swapped files were also the most downloaded on legal music sites, indicating that what’s popular is popular.”

Though the report applies to music rather than books, publishers might anticipate similar sales curves as electronic books gain popularity.

Multi-Platform Books for Kids

From Publisher's Weekly: 

After last year's launch of The 39 Clues, Scholastic's elaborate book series wrapped in a contest connected to a Web site with play-along trading cards, the Amanda Project [a multimedia project for young adult to be launched by HarperCollins this fall] is primed to be one of the most ambitious multimedia children's series to date.

And, whether the Amanda Project fails or succeeds, its existence speaks to the fast-changing face of children's publishing. Kids, more so than adults, are ready for books delivered on a multitude of platforms, willing to follow stories that begin in print and wend their way onto computer screens and various hand-held devices. This makes for both an exciting and anxious moment in children's publishing, as longtime progenitors of print and ink tales are trying to figure out how to present content, and a reading experience, in a wholly different way.

Read more here.

Taiwan: Writers' Book Videos

How do you convey the message of a book on video? Author and translator Leonard Chien explains:

[At year end,] the China Times (中國時報) ... announces their picks on “Books of the Year” (開卷好書獎), the best Chinese books published in Taiwan in that year. Since 2006, the newspaper also makes book videos for awarded writers, representing their works in word, music and image.

... Although the videos are all in Chinese, hopefully they can still convey and reproduce the atmosphere in their works.

Take a look at the videos and Chien's translations here.

Listened to a Good Magazine Lately?

Magazines are increasingly offer podcasts to accompany their print and web offerings. MinOnline highlights five magazine podcasts as examples in this blog entry. A few Christian magazines offering podcasts include:

• Relevant magazine podcasts include editorials and features from the current issue.
• CCM Magazine features interviews with Christian music artists.
• Christianity Today Inc. has news, editorials, and contributions from Books and Culture and Christianity Today. 
• Christian Bookworm Reviews offers podcasts of its interviews of Christian fiction writers such as David C. Cook's novelist Claudia Mair Burney, author of the recent release Zora and Nicky.

Reaching the YouTube Generation

The Digitalist, from PanMacmillan.com, observes that:

There is often a perception that digital text is somehow different to print. It hyperlinks, is easy to update and is, according to the argument, filled with pointless invective and ephemera. It doesn’t allow for deep and considered reading, catering as it does for the atrophied attention spans of the YouTube generation. Despite their recreation of print, ebooks are often included in this category.

However the YouTube generation isn’t even reading online. It’s, er, watching YouTube. In “Is YouTube the Next Google” read/write web outlined a growing trend--rather than looking for a search term in Google, kids will type into it YouTube and see what turns up.

How well are your authors represented on YouTube, GodTube, and similar sites? Do you have at least one video for each of the authors in your publishing roster? Video segments do not have to be long, or even professionally produced, to make an impact. They do not even have to feature the author, if he or she is not available (as is often the case with translations or classic reprints). So ask yourself: do you make it a practice to make video recordings of your authors' speaking engagements and live readings? Do you post them online? Where will the next generation find out about your titles?

David C. Cook on Facebook, GodTube, and YouTube

We are excited to share videos developed in support of some of our recent and forthcoming David C. Cook releases.  We hope you enjoy viewing the new video book trailers for Brennan Manning's The Furious Longing of God and Leonard Sweet's So Beautiful, as well as hearing from authors like Francis Chan, Greg Paul, Micca Campbell, Brian Mackert and more about their books, and even about WildWood Forest VBS.

To see the videos and become a fan of David C. Cook on Facebook, click here, or check us out on GodTube or YouTube. Enjoy!

Tanzania: Bookseller's Advice

Gerald Kitabu, a columnist for The Guardian, interviewed Godfrey George Kioko, manager of the bookshop for E & D Readership and Development Agency. His advice?

My advice to all stake holders in the book sector is to put more  effort in improving readership. Book contents should be repackaged into popular forms such as theatre performances, oral story telling, radio and television plays.

This  advice is key in light of

... the issue of poverty, as many parents are not able to purchase books for their children. The cost of books is also prohibitive, making them a luxury by many Tanzanians. Books are not available in rural areas.

So how do you reach the poor in an oral culture? Among many suggestions, Kioko recommends publishers turn books into dramatic presentations to effectively reach mass audiences. Study your list. Are any of the works you most want to reach the poor in your country suitable for such promotion?

Rick Warren and Reader's Digest

Rick Warren and Reader's Digest are partnering to launch, early next year, The Purpose-Driven Connection, a quarterly magazine for "people who are seeking their purpose in life and wish to interact with others on their spiritual journeys." The partnership will also include development of additional products including "DVDs, workbooks, Internet-based discussion guides and a Christian social networking website." What does Warren hope the partnership will accomplish? He is quoted as saying, “The Purpose Driven Connection represents more than simply integrated multimedia resources; it will become a platform for a movement of people to change the world.” And changing the world is fun, said Warren to Christianity Today.

Latin America: Christian Communicators, Broadcasters Meet

Christian communicators and broadcasters from Latin America met in Panama from October 7-11,2008, to take part in the COICOM conference with the theme: "For a New Generation of Communicators Towards the Transformation of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula." Five different courses were offered: radio production, television production, media and multimedia in church, new media and communication technologies, and leadership. The conference aims to help broadcasters and other media providers to communicate the Gospel and the Word of God to the unreached in a professional manner. Among those present at the event were Transforma Latinoamérica, COMIBAM, Lausanne, CONELA, and many other organizations engaged in efforts to evangelize Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula.  A Spanish-language summary and a video of the event is available at the COICOM site.

Sweden: Illegal File Sharing of Audio and E-Books

Earlier this year, the Swedish Publishers Association discovered that 85 per cent of Swedish bestsellers are currently available on  The Pirate Bay. 

The Association reports:

 The Pirate Bay is one of the world’s largest websites for illegal file sharing (a so-called Bit Torrent tracking site), where music, movies, audio books, e-books, computer software, gaming software etc. are made available without the permission of the rightful copyright holders.

The survey shows that there are currently about 1,700 Swedish audio books and slightly more than 300 Swedish e-books listed on The Pirate Bay. At each scan, the number of unique titles had increased.

The result of the survey is shocking and in many ways discouraging. Even though the Swedish market offers good legal download services for audio books and e-books, the electronic piracy of these products are growing. An analysis of the Swedish Publishers Associations sales statistics for 2007 shows that the number of new audio book are increasing while the sale is decreasing. Thus, illegal file sharing is now having an apparent effect on the new and fragile market of audio books.