Normally, we don’t do this*, but needs must and all that. We dutifully waited for the archived edition of yesterday’s Publisher’s Lunch to be posted because Michael Cader did a bang-up job of reviewing the cool (and sometimes perplexing) new features at Amazon.com. We appreciate this, given our natural laziness. Alas, the good stuff is on the members’ only side of the Publisher’s Marketplace divide, so you’ll have to be satisfied with us telling you how great the story is.
Probably you’ve noticed them: the plogs, the wiki, the stats showing what percentage of people who viewed the book your viewing bought it (and, if they didn’t buy that book, what book they bought), and more. In fact, if there’s a Web 2.0 concept out there that Amazon hasn’t integrated, well, that’s only because days remain at 24-hours max. Still, there are podcasts and Flickr-like features. To quote Cader,
What does Amazon want to be when it grows up? In today’s interactive, social networking, tag-and-post Web 2.0 culture, whatever you want it to be. In case you hadn’t noticed, Amazon continues to introduce a slew of new bells and whistles to their already-crowded book (and other product) pages, many of which echo other of-the-moment trends and sites from around the web.
He then throws down the gauntlet to publishers, and we, for one, cannot agree more. This stuff is cheap and easy and would really make some of the more disconnected publisher initiatives come together.
Why shouldn’t your official page about an author or book be the primary place where readers visit, post, comment, clip, link and connect? Why shouldn’t you host blogs for your authors and readers alike? Why shouldn’t you encourage MySpace and Squidoo pages and viral videos and podcasts and blog links about your authors and your books? Doing one thing (hey, we have a podcast), one time (for one of our 30,000 titles in print we have a stand-alone web site with free browsing), one way (we sent ARCs to 75 bloggers for our big March release) doesn’t count.
* – Probably a big, fat lie, but what are you gonna do? Fire us?
Technorati Tags: Publishers Lunch, Michael Cader, Amazon.com, Web 2.0
