Since August 2008, the Digital Bookmobile (@DigiBookmobile) has traversed America coast-to-coast, allowing readers of all ages in over 400 venues to experience digital audiobook, ebook, music, and video downloads from their public library and immerse themselves in an interactive learning environment.
The traveling community outreach exhibit is an updated version of traditional bookmobiles but is equipped with Internet-connected PCs, high-definition monitors, a sound system, and a variety of portable media players.
The goal of every marketer is to nurture customers of brands into lifelong raving fans so they enthusiastically talk about those brands and continually recommend them to whoever will listen (thereby contributing to increased sales). Here at Somersault, we’re raving fans about books and publishing, and we focus our sites on generating that same enthusiasm in others.
We think lessons can be learned from watching this 8-minute ESPN (@espn) documentary video. Consider how you’d go about turning customers of your brand into the kind of people who would identify themselves with it so strongly that they’d include it in their own send-offs.
A consistent problem with promotional book readings and signings is that they're often barely attended. Now Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) senior news editor Calvin Reid (@calreid) reports, “Science author Andrew Kessler is launching a new online venture called Togather.com (@TogatherInc), a ‘fansourcing’ platform that allows authors or their fans to propose an author event and get commitments from fans planning to attend well before the event is held.”
Much like a crowdfunding site like Kickstarter, Togather.com allows an author to know in advance whether there’s enough interest and support to hold an event at all.
Togather.com is free for authors. Writers establish an account that will allow them to plan events on a custom author event page that can be circulated through social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. “The event page allows authors to set up a tour, schedule events, tweak the details, and solicit support for the event before the author arrives,” Kessler said.
In a phone interview with PW, Kessler outlined how Togather works. Using the Togather account, an author can decide what kind of support he or she will require to actually hold the event — sell, say, 20 books, or get RSVPs from 60 people if it’s a school or free event, or sell tickets. Since one of the criteria for an event can be book sales, Togather is also organized to sell books. Fans can go to the page and propose additional events, and the author can review the proposal, accept it or ask for changes, or tweak the level of commitments.
The site lets authors notify their fans how many people it will take to reach a certain level of book sales (Kessler consulted with booksellers on this)....For book buys or other financial transactions, the site will take credit card numbers but not process the sale until the desired commitment level is achieved — if there’s not enough interest, the event is canceled and no one is charged....Kessler said, “[Togather] turns fans into your publicists.”
Here’s a fun way to display the creative variety of typefaces. This Periodic Table of Typefaces by designer Cam Wilde shows the 100 most popular, influential, and notorious typefaces used throughout time. See it enlarged. A print copy is available.
Below is another version of it, promotingJust My Type, the book about “that pivotal moment when fonts left the world of Letraset and were loaded onto computers, and typefaces became something we realized we all have an opinion about.”
Wired magazine’s (@wired) executive editor Thomas Goetz (@tgoetz) explains 7 rules to use when pinpointing trends that will help you prepare for tomorrow:
1. Look for cross-pollinators: the best ideas — the ones with the most impact and longevity — are transferable.
2. Surf the exponentials: catch the wave of smaller, cheaper, and faster; channel that steady improvement into business plans and research agendas.
3. Favor the liberators: look for ways to turn scarcity into plenty and turn static into flow, bringing motion where there was obstruction.
4. Give points for audacity: go beyond picayune problems and mere incremental solutions; get in over your head.
5. Bank on openness: forsake proprietary claims and avoid hierarchy; be agile, flexible, and poised to leap from opportunity to opportunity.
6. Demand deep design: good design is much more than a veneer; it’s essential and it intrinsically prioritizes; it’s irresistible.
7. Spend time with time wasters: culture is created where people are fiddling with tools, coining new lingo, swapping new techniques.
Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller’s (@thebookseller) digital blog Futurebook (@TheFutureBook), interviewed Bob Stein, founder and co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, who insists publishers need to make books social and look for ways to “build the conversation around books.”
"The current system of publishing doesn't really support the shape publishing is taking on as it develops," says Stein, who founded The Voyager Company in 1985, the first commercial multimedia CD-ROM publisher. But publishers are chronically slow at recognising what is happening to them and grasping the opportunities before they emerge. Stein argues that the real innovation is happening left-of-centre in sectors such as gaming, where collaborative narratives have already taken root. "The future is being born outside their field of vision," he says.
"The idea of publishing is to move ideas around time and space," is how he sees it....His big idea now is "social reading", the concept that in the future texts will become one part of a much larger conversation that happens around them, with notes and context shared on a collaborative platform.
Stein is currently working on SocialBook — a reading platform that allows users to interact with texts, leave notes, and begin conversations around those books. The site will have free and paid-for areas, though the commercial model is not yet finalized. "It begins as YouTube for social documents in the free space, but then we'll build Amazon for publishing," says Stein.
This video by Salon Alpin tells the story of a bookmark stuck in a forgotten book that is one day knocked over by wind. The bookmark experiences its environment by surfing the pages that turn in to ocean-waves, enjoying the ride of its life. As the book cover closes, light reveals new challenges.
See 3 videos that show the making of the above video.
Wieden + Kennedy's (@WiedenKennedy) production of the universally heartwarming “Thank you, Mom” campaign for Procter & Gamble (@ProcterGamble) originally launched for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Its messaging continues for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London with “Best Job,” a cinematic and emotional anthem. It has achieved more than 5 million views online and it won 5 Lions at Cannes last month, including golds in Film and Film Craft. Adweek (@Adweek) says:
The new spot is a beautiful testament to parents around the world who have helped their children through the grueling daily grind toward becoming an Olympic athlete.
The tagline of the online-only ad is, “The hardest job in the world is the best job in the world.”
Its new companion video spot, “Kids” (already reaching 1.7 million views), has a similar heart-tugging payout at the end:
What makes these videos so effective and viral? They’re
·beautifully filmed, directed, and edited
·poignant
·emotional
·brief
·relevant
·able to draw the viewer in to self-identify with the message.
Twitter will have staff monitoring Olympic-related tweets from athletes, coaches, Olympics officials, NBC personalities and others and curating the best content surrounding the #Olympics hashtag on a single page.
NBC will promote the page and the hashtag during its on-air coverage across each of the networks providing coverage, including in primetime coverage on NBC itself.
Russian publisher Lamartis (@lamartis) says it strives to combine all the elements that make books timeless, majestic, and beautiful. It positions its books for “sophisticated art connoisseurs and book collectors” and creates books for “the adornment of public, corporate, and home libraries.” The above video wonderfully captures the artistic craftsmanship of the Lamartis method.
The promise we can all go paperless has been around for years, so why is it that despite email, smartphones, e-readers, tablets, and computers, we’re still so dependent on pen and paper?
BBC Click (@BBCClick) reporter LJ Rich explores why paper has such staying power in this hi-tech age. She says
Demand for paper is at an all-time high. Finnish paper provider Foex predicts that the global paper market could reach a new record of 400m tons in 2012.
Since paper is not going away, technology is being developed to enhance it. The above video is from Layar (@Layar), a company specializing in augemented reality that wants to make the print world clickable.
With Layar, publishers and advertisers can quickly and easily activate their static print pages with digital experiences...all without hiring developers or installing software.
Layar makes it possible for consumers to scan with their smartphones a printed magazine cover, articles, photos, and more, to immediately see digital content such as a video or more detailed and localized information.
Back in April, one of our blogposts explained how AbeBooks (@AbeBooks) uses videos to promote itself. One of them answers the question, “Why do old books smell?”
Similarly to how people enjoy the smell of the interior of new cars and look for ways to replicate it, now comes a perfume for people who prefer the smell of books.
Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld came up with the name Paper Passion, which launched on July 12 in Wallpaper magazine’s annual Handmade issue. It was actually at Wallpaper‘s Handmade exhibition in Milan last year that the idea for the perfume originated, when German publisher Gerhard Steidl remarked that his favorite scent was a “freshly printed book.”
Since then, Steidl has been working with perfumer Geze Schoen on perfecting the scent, using only four or five ingredients. Synthesizing paper’s unique aroma was apparently not an easy task. Schoen explained, “The smell of printed paper is dry and fatty; they are not notes you often work with.”
If you’ve read this far, you obviously have a keen interest in books. So you’ll want to visit this website (@bookshelfporn) that features photo upon beautiful photo of bookshelves.
