BookNet Canada

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.

(Find the transcript here: https://www.booknetcanada.ca/blog/2017/5/8/podcast-audiobooks-and-the-sound-of-sales).

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.

(Find the transcript here: https://www.booknetcanada.ca/blog/2017/4/13/podcast-advanced-sales-strategies-for-selling-diverse-books).

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.

(Find the transcript here: https://www.booknetcanada.ca/blog/2017/3/15/podcast-the-irresistible-opportunity-mcsweeneys-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.

(Find the transcript here: https://www.booknetcanada.ca/blog/2017/2/28/podcast-monetizing-content-and-what-traditional-publishers-can-learn-from-wattpad).

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.

(Find the transcript here: https://www.booknetcanada.ca/blog/2017/1/31/podcast-a-look-back-at-2016).

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.

(Find the transcript here: https://www.booknetcanada.ca/blog/2016/12/20/podcast-why-the-print-book-wont-die-part-two).

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.

(Find the transcript here: https://www.booknetcanada.ca/blog/2016/11/25/podcast-why-the-print-book-wont-die-part-one).

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.

(Find the transcript here: https://www.booknetcanada.ca/blog/2016/10/19/podcast-when-nothing-ever-goes-out-of-print).

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.

(Find the transcript here: https://www.booknetcanada.ca/blog/2016/9/26/podcast-publishers-enter-the-bookstore-game).

Long live the audiobook! Thanks to smartphones, podcasts, and our oh-so-busy lives, the digital audiobook is making a comeback. We talk with some industry players to discuss the format's reinvention, how the industry is adapting to increased demand, and where Canadian-produced audiobooks fit into all this.

(Find the transcript here: https://www.booknetcanada.ca/blog/2016/7/27/podcast-the-audiobook-gets-its-groove-back).

Hungry for more data? Keep an eye on the BookNet Canada Blog in the coming weeks for more results from our research: booknetcanada.ca/blog.