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Hi. I'm Linda Ruth and welcome to Publishing Dojo's video blog. I was just talking to Lauren
Gabriel of Barnes and Nobel about the Nook, and for you publisher who were waiting to
hear if you're going to get your publication published on the Nook, don't despair. Barnes
and Nobel has about 200 publications in their pipeline and they hope to get them all processed
and through the pipeline by the end of the year so you should be hearing an answer before
too long. Also, Book-a-zines. Yes. MagNet tells us that all is not lost in the field
of magazine newsstand sales. There has been growth on the newsstand and that growth comes
from the category of Book-a-zines: those high-priced, high-quality, one-shots or annuals that many
publishers have been using to fill in for some of the loss in their frequency titles.
Besides making up for some of the loss in frequency titles I think it's very possible
that Book-a-zines are causing some of the loss in sales of frequency titles. I, for
one, don't buy two or three issues of frequency titles when I have purchased a $9.95 Book-a-zine,
I don't know about you. Then there's Siri. Siri is Apple's personal assistant, all voice-controlled.
It's really an interesting example of artificial intelligence and although it's not completely
unique - we have other examples of artificial intelligence with for example things like
Cleverbot and the bots online and we have voice-activated search that Google's already
been using - the interesting thing about Siri though is it does not use the search engines,
it does not use Google at all, it's bypassing Google for a lot of its searching because
when somebody asks a query as to where to find something or what to do, it'll go to
a location-based service such as Yelp and come up with a recommendation. It's going
to really redo the way a lot of publishers, in fact everybody does SEO, but on the other
hand, we're not in the business simply of keeping Google in business, are we? A lot
of people are worried and upset and nervous about it; I personally think it's great. There's
going to be other ways we can optimize search. And as much as I love Google, and getting
to know Google, and how we can optimize websites in Google, it's great to know that there's
going to be a lot of other things we can do to build our ranking on our mobile devices.
We just need to keep that into focus as we continue with our SEO for the coming year.
And finally, QR codes. I do have a vlog about the most recent issue of Publishing Executive
about why we use QR codes, and the most interesting reason is something I heard from a mobile
marketing expert Dan Hollings. He says that when he's building his lists - his mobile
marketing lists - the names on that list that have the most longevity, that are less likely
to cancel, unsubscribe, fall off the list, are those who have engaged at the retail level,
in some way joining the list because of some promotion, some kind of convergence of physical
and online that happened at the retail level. And one of the best ways of establishing that
point of convergence is at the QR code level. So think about what you can be doing with
QR codes, especially as you build your mobile marketing list. So that's today's addition
of Publishing Dojo's video blog, news, great ideas, and trends in magazine publishing.
Thanks so much.