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Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific

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Peter Carey, Droit Moral and Google Book Search

April 07, 2006

One of my favourite authors is Peter Carey, of Bacchus Marsh in Victoria, and long-term resident in New York City. He's just published, Theft, a "love" story about Butcher Bones, divorced and out-of-fashion artist, his idiot savant brother, and mysterious out-of-towner, Marlene, claiming the droit moral to a famous painting. Intriguing stuff..

Amongst all the print and radio publicity surrounding the book, I wanted to see on Hitwise how much of this was reflected on the web, how this translated to online retail, and where Google Book Search fits in.

The chart below shows a dramatic surge in searches on the author name, 'peter carey', week ending April 1, 2006, indicating a significant amount of interest directed online during the book launch:

AU Share of Searches on 'peter carey'

Hitwise data illustrates however that publishers and book retailers are not fully optimising on these launches by integrating their marketing with search online. This below figure shows the industries that received traffic on 'peter carey' during the same time period:

Industry Traffic Share on 'peter carey' Searches

Blogs, Education - Institutions and Entertainment - Books and Writing categories recieved traffic on the term, 'peter carey'. Hitwise tracks Shopping & Classifieds - Books and Book Publishers websites separately, and these were notably missing from this traffic.

With the beta launch of Google Book Search and ensuing debate (see Bill's post) book retailers and publishers need to think about their online strategy and move fast. Hitwise Australia data showed a massive spike in visits to the local Google Book Search after launch followed by sustained growth: View image

This demonstrates consumer interest for finding and sampling book content online, as well as possible demand for both mail order and purchasing online access to books. The potential is huge for increasing book sales through an online channel with improved search technology. I unfortunately couldn't find Theft on Google Book Search, and trotted along to Readings on Lygon St instead..

btw, the translation for droit moral is the right of an artist or their decedents to authenticate an art work, and relates to copyright. This concept ties in aptly with the Google Book Search debate, and it'll be interesting to see how authors take to online distribution of their intellectual property.

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