At TOC, you're as likely to run into media professionals, entrepreneurs and innovators as you are publishers, booksellers and others working in traditional publishing. This, in turn, makes the underlying themes as varying and diverse as the attendees. This is the fourth in a series, taking a look at five themes that permeated interviews, sessions and/or keynotes at this year's show. The complete series will be posted here.

Discovering how readers discover books and other types of content is becoming more and more important as the digital era ushers in a multitude of avenues for readers to find books, blogs, news, websites, etc. At this year's TOC show, the issue of discovery was a major theme, and in many discussions, data and discovery went hand in hand.

Otis Chandler, founder and CEO of Goodreads.com, presented a data-driven analysis of how people find books in the "How Consumers Discover Books Online" session. He defined discovery as "all the touchpoints in the mind of the consumer it takes to get them to decide to purchase and read a book." Using Goodreads' data as a basis, he shared the ways people discover books:

Tied with people adding books during Goodreads registration, "Search" was the number one method of discovery. And Chandler noted, "those users had heard of the books elsewhere." Goodreads conducted a survey to find out exactly how readers found those books:

Chandler also noted discovery differences between types of readers. For instance, avid readers are less likely to find books through friend recommendations than casual readers, but more likely than casual readers to find books through Goodreads' recommendations. Different genres had unique results as well — romance, fantasy, SciFi, and YA readers were more likely find books by browsing genres and lists, for instance.

The slide presentation from the session can be found here.

The "Beyond 'Discovery' — Understanding The True Potential Of An Insight-oriented Publishing Environment" session addressed the issue of discovery from a data standpoint as well, in terms of how data is used to facilitate discovery. Presenters Kristen McLean, founder and CEO of Bookigee, and Kelly Gallagher, vice president of publishing services at RR Bowker, took a look at how data used to be treated and how data needs to be used now to be effective. This is what Data & Information 1.0 looked like:

And this is what Data & Information 2.0 looks like:

Data & Information 2.0 takes the data and analysis, puts it into context and uses it to achieve more effective discovery and sales:

The session also reviewed some tools and insights to help content creators better connect with readers and discussed the importance of engaging customers in real-time. The session slides can be found here as soon as they are available.


In a video interview, Linda Gagnon, senior vice president of Global Digital Markets at Baker & Taylor, addressed the issue of discovery from an ecosystem standpoint. She said "the key is going to be getting consumers to discover they can consume content on a multitude of devices — that's really where the future is: discovery and utilization of these new devices with content that they're used to." As to how less-avid readers can be brought into the ecosystem and how they can discover content, she responded:

"Over 70% of consumers have never bought a digital book. It's that 70% that we need to now attract. They haven't decided to buy a dedicated device because there's no need to expend the money for that because they just don't read that often. So, we need to find them where they live. The OEMs have a way to connect with them with the devices that [consumers] have for multi-purposes. The next step is to provide ways of discovering the content that is most important to them across those devices, so they're not tied into any specific ecosystem ... once they experience content that's relevant to them, I think that will drive additional purchases once they get hooked."

Gagnon's entire interview can be viewed in the following video:



If you couldn't make it to TOC, or you missed a session you wanted to see, sign up for the TOC 2012 Complete Video Compilation and check out our archive of free keynotes and interviews.

Related:

Hooked on context

The search for serendipitous recommendations

Goodreads chases the recommendation Holy Grail

The more you engage, the better the advice

More themes from TOC 2012

Wolfram Alpha isn't the "Google killer" that many hyped it up to be prior to its 2009 launch. Instead, the self-described computational knowledge engine takes a completely different approach to letting users find and analyze information. Rather than scouring the Web and ranking everybody's pages in the order it thinks we'd find them useful, it uses its own data sets and computational power to return detailed reports and analysis about whatever topics users query it for.

Tomorrow, the service will ramp things up a notch when its "pro" version launches. For $5 per month, Wolfram Alpha Pro will allow users to do way more with its data, as well as enable them to upload their own. The premium offering will be discounted for students and enterprise users.

Sponsor

This is freemium done right. What Wolfram Alpha is bolting onto its core offering is powerful and useful enough to justify what is undeniably a very reasonable price tag. For more users, what Wolfram Alpha's standard version does will continue to be enough for educational and other research purposes. For those with more specialized or comprehensive data needs, paying $5 will be well worth it.

The value offered by Wolfram Alpha Pro is two-fold, and it sits at both ends of the query process. First, users can upload their own data sets and have the service crunch through it for them, try to understand it and built out reports and graphs that previously could have taken them hours in Excel or elsewhere. In addition to text, you can even input images and get a detailed report about their visual characteristics.

Second, once a report is built - be it from Wolfram's data or your own - you can export the end results, images and all. This allows you to take the data analysis one step further using whatever other tools you want, effectively open-sourcing Wolfram Alpha's results. You can also turn charts and graphs into interactive versions of themselves. The Verge put together a detailed, hands-on overview of Wolfram Alpha Pro that is well worth checking out.

The potential these features have for people like journalists, business owners and Web analytics professionals is enormous. Just plug in a spreadsheet or other data set and let the knowledge engine work its computational magic. So much of the heavy lifting is shifted over to Wolfram Alpha's servers, freeing up the individual to spend time understanding the information, more easily spotting important trends and deciding if any further analysis is needed.

The premium plan is the latest part of the company's monetization strategy, which to date has included paid mobile apps, licensing of its API to third parties and various enterprise services.

Discuss

Terrier IR -- open source (Mozilla) text search engine, now with Hadoop support.
s3ql -- open source (GPLv3) Linux filesystem which stores its data on Google Storage, Amazon S3, or OpenStack. (via Adam Shand)
Esprima -- open source (BSD) fast Javascript parser in Javascript. (via Javascript Weekly)
Hogan.js -- open source (Apache) Javascript templating engine from Twitter. If it proves anywhere near as good as Bootstrap, it'll be heavily used.

Terrier IR -- open source (Mozilla) text search engine, now with Hadoop support.
s3ql -- open source (GPLv3) Linux filesystem which stores its data on Google Storage, Amazon S3, or OpenStack. (via Adam Shand)
Esprima -- open source (BSD) fast Javascript parser in Javascript. (via Javascript Weekly)
Hogan.js -- open source (Apache) Javascript templating engine from Twitter. If it proves anywhere near as good as Bootstrap, it'll be heavily used.

Apple could be planning to expand its voice command capabilities on the iPhone thanks to the pending acquisition of Siri, which makes an iPhone app that lets users perform Web searches by voice command. News that the company was acquired first appeared in an FTC premerger notification (PDF) and was confirmed by Silicon Alley Insider and others.

For those who have already played around with Google's search app for the iPhone, Siri's voice search capabilities will appear quite similar, but it goes further than just showing search results. With the app running, users can speak what they're looking for ("What movies are playing nearby?" or "Make a reservation at Francesca Forno for two people at 6pm"). The app will then determine what service you need—a basic list of search results, a Yelp review page, a reservation through OpenTable, etc.—and list out your options along with maps and other data.

If Apple chooses to integrate Siri's technology into the iPhone OS, Google's Voice Search app would be redundant for many users—after all, if the OS can do it, why bother downloading an extra app that does less? That's probably the point. Considering that Apple may still have a Google Maps replacement in the wings, it certainly seems as if the company is making more of an effort to separate itself from Google, though both Apple and Google publicly insist that their relationship is still strong.



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Crawling webpages isn’t something most of us are set up to do. That’s why 80legs turned it into a service, spidering two billion web pages per day. It launched with only Java support. Now the company has added an API Kit for Python programmer, responding to its users most popular request (our 80legs profile).

The web crawling service starts with a basic account that is free for limited use. There are also subscription options, in addition to paying by the million pages and CPU hour. The fees, of course, are small in comparison to creating your own farm of web crawling servers.

It’s interesting–and potentially convenient–that the two languages the service uses are the same two supported by App Engine, Google’s cloud-based application hosting service (our Google App Engine API profile). However, CEO Shion Deysarkar said in an email that not many 80legs developers are using App Engine. “We did Java first because we write all of our stuff in Java.  Python came second because it was the most requested language,” said Deysarker.

Last fall we wrote about the 80legs contest, which launched in preparation for its 80apps store. Developers can sell apps, keeping 100% of the revenue–just paying 80legs for the page crawling and CPU-hours.

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources 80legs API Profile

Trulia, the real estate search app that's all about the Google Maps mashups, has added rental properties to its listings, giving the five best apartment search tools a run for their money. More »