Making a Live Post Code

The Exact Editions import process now makes post codes live, clickable, resources. We have been doing this for a week. It is not easy to predict all the doors that this might open for our publishing partners. But it is very clear that it makes advertisements more useful and more interesting. Take a simple classified ad in the Quaker weekly The Friend, which we distribute every Friday. The Penn Club has a regular ad in the magazine:

The Friend

23 May 2008

Page 18

That clipping shows you the ad, but it does not show you the live links (post code, email and url), for that you need to have a subscription to our service. If you were a subscriber you would note that the post code was highlighted, and that the link takes you to an optimal view in Google Maps. If you subscribe to one of our magazines you can state on your preferences page which map system you want to use (Multimap and Street Map UK are also supported). We have a number of other resolvers in hand...... and will gradually add post code systems from other countries.

Google has for some time provided live geo-links from some of its books. But their approach is based on selecting books with a strong geo-interest (for example this travel guide to Ecuador) and then providing a constructed map view of the places mentioned in the book (probably more difficult, but less scaleable than our zip-code resuscitation method). So far as I know, neither Google, nor any other digital edition platform has yet done automated linking from post codes to a mapping system. But, of course I could be wrong about this and will print a correction if someone can produce the counter-example(s).

There is also the important difference that the Google system is really producing an annotated map from a book, whereas our system is providing navigation links from explicit items within the text. One might say, that if a post code deserves to be printed, it merits being made into a navigation link. Its simply more useful and more valuable that way.

Clickable ISBNs: Who Owns the Clickability?

We have been supporting clickable ISBN's for just over a month. And we now have a rather rich example of the potential of this enhancement. The Bookseller (central source of industry information for publishers and booksellers in the UK) are using Exact Editions to make their substantial bi-annual Supplements available through the web. The main (adult) title has 8,943 ISBNs in it which are all now live links (I can promise you that they all work and I have clicked every single one ;-)). The children's books Supplement has 1,767 (yep they all work too).

Here is a typical page with 16 jackets, 16 corresponding live links for the ISBNs, and as it happens some live phone numbers, which is very handy if you want to order some of the books and need to get in touch with Prestel or Macmillan distribution straight off the page. Clicking on the link at the top left of the array (the title is Bob Dylan: the Drawn Blank Series) takes you straight to a page of Google search results on the ISBN.

The Bookseller

Buyer's Guide Spring 2008

Page 9

Google do a pretty good job on searching for ISBN's (as one would expect). But there are lots of ISBN resolvers that the page could link to: Amazon, Waterstones, OCLC's WorldCat.

This is a promotional service for the Bookseller, so they get to determine to which service the ISBN linker will target. This is after all an open and free service where we know nothing about the users, do not track their sessions, and know nothing of their identity. But we are also offering this linking service for our paid subscribers, for publications to which they subscribe. Looking at usability from the customers point of view, it seems appropriate that deciding the preferred ISBN resolver should form part of the user's preferences on her individual account. The user should be able to select the ISBN-resolver that will be most useful to them. So, in our view the Publisher owns the choice for default clickability (and the Bookseller may wish to develop its own business model to exploit this service with individual ISBNs getting different treatment, they will certainly get some very useful aggregate stats), but the individual subscriber who is paying for a service should be able to choose his own bookshop/library.

When it comes to owning the 'relationship' it seems to us that publishers can and should own the default, and different magazines/publishers may have different choices, but customers should own and control the over-ride. The final say is always with the customer. Does that seem like the right policy?

Although this application of the Exact Editions system adds value for magazine publishers and subscribers, it will probably be of even greater interest to book publishers. Many book publishers offer their catalogues on line as PDFs, but the Exact Editions system is faster, more searchable and better with links which have an obvious application in e-commerce.

Searching is fast:

Penguin 84
Bloomsbury 67
Quercus 43

Clickable ISBN's

The Exact Editions system now makes ISBNs clickable and the first examples (for subscribers only, as the issue is behind the subs pay-wall) are in the current issue of Opera magazine.

This is the example that I tried first:

Opera

January 2008

Page 95

Which today takes you to this page. ISBNs have recently gone to 13 digits (that allows for a lot of books and publishers) but Amazon is currently using a look-up table for the 13 digit numbers, which is why you land on a results page. Currently we target the Amazon UK pages by default, but this should become a configurable option.

Clickable phone numbers and clickable ISBNs......more good things for the iPhone.

Site upgrades

Every couple of months we have a site upgrade. The software that runs our service, the databases and the individual user accounts, is enhanced with a new version. We do this so that additional features can be added to the service, and usually there are some small but subtle changes to our interface. Today, our Technical Director told me that there had been a site upgrade and that with luck no changes at all would be apparent. Why have a change which changes nothing?

While I was pondering this, he told me that the point of the new release was so that we could accommodate linguistic changes......So here is a clue:

numéros | préférences | à propos | contact | déconnexion

About half the consumer magazines in the world are published in languages other than English. At some stage we need to be capable of delivering them.

Dont you love the newsagents that you see in big capital cities that are stuffed with magazines and newspapers in umpteen different languages?

Ordering Search Results

We have just introduced the option to sort your search results, by the date of publication of the issue in which the search term appears. If you search the 50-odd "open access" trial issues, for occurrences of 'David Cameron" there are currently 23 results, and they will be sorted by relevance (the default setting -- which will weight more highly a page on which "David Cameron" is a high proportion of the text on the page),
or by newest,
or by oldest.

There are some large archives lined up to come into the system. This additional function will be useful for sorting through search results on accounts where there are hundreds of issues because a customer has multiple subscriptions.

Broadsheets and Renewals

Overnight there was a stealthy upgrade to the Exact Editions service. Ideally nobody should notice but we can talk about some of the silent enhancements here.

Gutenberg was not thinking about the web when he invented the printing press. Life would be a lot simpler now if he had made a press which could only print on one size and format of paper. We could then optimize everything for a single reading frame. But alas, with the Exact Editions system, we have to cater for 100's and potentially 1,000's of different page sizes with some more or less regular image sizes (no more than 11 at present). We reserve the largest 'page' sizes for the magazines that really need them, because offering a larger image puts more burden on the not-to-be-overworked scroll-bar. Our largest JPEG just got a bit larger, 1,700 pixels across. But it will be a few weeks before we show the broadsheet that will take advantage of this.

Of more immediate interest, we can now renew our subscribers automatically. 'Renewals' are available from the user's 'Preferences' link on your account page. They of course work fairly, in the sense that the renewal starts from the date from which the current subscription expires. This has the incidental advantage that a user can now subscribe for 2, 3 or more years by simply renewing the subscription as many times as needed.