Pop quiz:
Question: How many book titles are there in the world?
Answer: About 65 million.
A recent article in The Economist, Not bound by anything, estimates that Google is scanning about 10M books per year and placing them in its online library. The article goes on to ask some questions about how books will be read in the future. The focus of article is on the fate of books as they exist today and what types of material will remain suited to become books. These are the books that are edited, printed, and distributed by publishing companies. It breaks out three categories of books:
- Reference: Books that are only read a section at a time or need frequent updating are likely to exist mostly online (encyclopedias, cookbooks).
- Non-fiction: Books which express an idea will be less restricted to the traditional length requirement of 250-300 pages. A 50-page book can have a life online. Non-fiction that exists online can have inbound and outbound hyperlinks. These will strengthen the usefulness of the book and provide a gauge of popularity.
- Fiction and Poetry: Many other forms will continue to exist physically because for some genres like poetry and fiction the book itself is part of the experience. It can be taken anywhere and read anytime and creates memory of a time and place. “That was the summer I spent reading Kurt Vonnegut on the beach.”
A marketing opportunity for technology companies?
But what about books that don’t come from the publishers? What opportunities are created when books can be undbundled, can exist online or offline, and can be of any length? For technology firms it creates an opportunity to attract readers and educate potential customers in a substantive way. Today many companies write articles and post blog entries about their company and their industry. Often these efforts are well-intentioned but haphazard and episodic, tied to an event or a product announcement.
The next step would be to consider those articles and posts as a possible book. You possess lots of information that your market needs to accomplish its goals, information that you may take for granted. It includes knowledge of challenges, trends, methods, and case studies and is information that customers and prospects value because they see a narrower slice of your industry than you do.
You don’t have to know what the outline of the book is at the beginning, just keep focused on a subject and keep adding articles and entries around categories in that subject. Many blogs naturally evolve a set of categories that are similar to chapters in a book.
Some examples of books arising from information on sites are Avinash Kaushik’s blog which he is turning into a book on website analytics and The Alternative Energy Store which hosts How-To Guides on its website. In these cases the authors took a more systematic approach to their subject. The result is that the site becomes a destination for information on their specialty subject.
Any technology company could do this because customers and developers are always hungry for good sources of credible information on their rapidly-changing technology and industry. It doesn’t matter if you ever “publish” the book in a bound edition (although you might want to, even if it’s just a PDF file that can be downloaded and printed). What matters is that by thinking of the information you are providing as a book, you’ll be more likely to write a body of material that will be more complete and will become an authoritative source on your subject.
Benefits of publishing information on your industry
- It’s easy to distribute and available to anyone that comes to your website.
- You can update information anytime and so visitors always have the latest version.
- You can measure the response to different subjects and let visitor interest guide which areas to write about more.
- You can frame the discussion by writing about your industry in the way that you would like others to see it.
- And most important of all, your company becomes a trusted source of information about your industry, and consequently you are more likely to be trusted when it comes to explaining your products and services.
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