In his latest blog post, publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin talks about an interesting discovery he made in the wake of interviewing publishers for a presentation on current trends in book publishing contracts—all the publishers seem to agree on the importance of working out new ways of marketing books in a post-e-book world. The decline of shelf space also means a decline in marketing opportunities.

Up ‘til now, books themselves have been critically important in marketing the books—seeing a title on display at a bookstore is its own form of advertising, and will place an awareness of the book in the mind of the shopper even if he later goes on to buy it from somewhere else. (And in that vein, books have also long been used to advertise other things; the whole point of a tie-in novelization has historically been to serve as a mini-movie poster—the studios could care less about whether the book takes a loss, or is even worth reading, as long as it drives awareness of the movie by being faced out in a bookstore.)

Shatzkin draws a distinction between “expensed marketing”—advertising a single-title in ways that serve to promote that title only, and “investment marketing”—building a brand to promote many titles over time. He notes that “expensed marketing” is what publishers and bookstores have always done, but believes the way forward is “investment marketing” instead. It doesn’t make sense to go to the trouble of digital promotion for only one book.

He suggests a way of doing this through attacking the problem of search and discovery, how difficult it is to find an e-book you want without having a physical store to browse through and examine titles. He would like an e-book app that would offer him a catalog of books tailored to his interests, and alerts when new such books are published.

I am sure regular fans of romance, sci-fi, historical fiction, business books, popular science, and many other subjects share the same frustrations I do with shopping for ebooks now. Any search you do returns more dirt than diamonds, more chaff than wheat, more noise than signal and, for the subjects nearest and dearest to me, far more books I have either already read or already rejected than that are new and of interest. It would be ever so much easier to have all this information presented in an app or an ebook that I could peruse at my leisure, online or off, and which would have proper navigation rather than a constant struggle with pointless links and back buttons.

Shatzkin expects something like this to become available by the end of 2011.

I would tend to agree that searching for e-books can be a problem, and people have been complaining about the browsing and searching problem for some time. Of course, there have been other tools developed to try to ameliorate this problem to some extent, such as Alexandria Digital Literature, but the existence of some tools doesn’t preclude the development of others. And I suspect that any solution to this problem is probably going to have to take multiple forms anyway.

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TeleRead Editor Chris Meadows has been writing for us--except for a brief interruption--since 2006. Son of two librarians, he has worked on a third-party help line for Best Buy and holds degrees in computer science and communications. He clearly personifies TeleRead's motto: "For geeks who love books--and book-lovers who love gadgets." Chris lives in Indianapolis and is active in the gamer community.

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