This article is a summary of the June book industry news. And yes, I have written about the potential acquisition of Simon & Schuster again.
It’s a great pleasure for us to introduce Alwin Hoogerdijk, the founder of Collectorz.com. Alwin kindly shared with us the inspiring story of his business, which started as a hobby and, unexpectedly for him, grew into a company with a number of successful software products. Please read on to learn more about how it all started, what solutions Alwin and his team came up with, and their future plans.
The book industry has been undergoing significant changes over the past few years, with advancements in technology and changes in consumer preferences affecting the way books are produced, sold, and read. One area where technology is having a significant impact is the collection, analysis, and application of book data. In particular, AI and machine learning are playing an increasingly important role in the book industry, enabling publishers, booksellers, and marketers to gain insights into consumer behavior, improve their marketing strategies, and make more informed decisions about the books they produce and sell.
In this article, you’ll find an overview of the major news that both took place in May and caught my eye.
ISBNdb now features over 34 million unique ISBNs in its collection. With its comprehensive and extensive database, ISBNdb caters to booksellers, book-related software development companies, libraries, educational institutions, and all other players in the book industry.
The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) was introduced in 1970 to provide a unique identifier for books. At the time, ISBNs consisted of 10 digits. The basic structure of the ISBN has remained the same over the years, although some changes have been made to accommodate the growing number of books being published.
We are used to searching by ISBN as the easiest way to find book data. However, ISBN is a relatively new book identification method, widely adopted in the 1970s.
When Johannes Gutenberg produced the first printed book in the fifteenth century, he probably wasn’t too concerned about book identification – his printed books never carried even his name or publishing date. That wasn’t a big deal because the book industry was in its infancy, and few books were published back in the day.
Voracious readers know that every book has one thing in common. No matter what genre, length, publisher, or art that adorns its cover, every book has an ISBN. That is, provided it was printed after 1970.
You’ve likely noticed a barcode with a serial number on the back of the book you’re reading. It’s easy to think that this is just for the cashier at your local bookstore to swipe, but it’s so much more than that—it’s an ISBN!
US Government Pulled the Plug on Big Five Merger
Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster were about to shrink the “Big Five” of publishing to the “Big Four”. However, the US Department of Justice had an objection to those plans. As is sometimes the way with government agencies, the objection turned into the merger being blocked.
Publishers, booksellers, libraries, educational institutions, and all other organizations, which professionally work with books, need a reliable source of information to retrieve data about thousands or even millions of books. This is when bibliographic databases come in very handy.
Using the databases’ APIs, you can quickly get titles, authors, cover art, and a lot of other book data by ISBN. Book databases enable members of the book industry to operate more efficiently and better serve their customers.