What is big data?
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Web sites and smart devices are producing vast streams of data with no obvious structure
What the term 'big data' means, and why experts believe a new breed of technology is required to handle it
The bookselling industry is centuries old, but its established operating model is crumbling around its ears. Having already been turned on its head by the Internet, the industry now faces even greater disruption from electronic books. But the rapid digitisation of what was once the quintessential paper-driven industry has also had benefits for booksellers.
According to Marc Parrish, vice president of retention and loyalty management at US bookseller Barnes & Noble, readers are buying more e-books than physical volumes. Such is the growth of e-book adoption that Parrish expects e-book sales to overtake paper sales within two years, he said at GigaOM’s Structure 2011 conference, held in New York in March.
That inversion of the purchasing process has huge ramifications for the business, but luckily for Barnes & Noble one advantage of e-book sales is that they create reams more data.
For example, having compared its electronic and physical sales, the company now knows that e-book buyers are more conservative in their book choices, sticking to a narrower range of titles than lovers of bound paper.
Simultaneously, through analysing data collected from its physical and online stores, Barnes & Noble has established that e-book buyers who continue to buy a broad range of books also tend to visit their stores more. The ability to track customer behaviour online and in store is vital to Barnes & Noble going forward, says Parrish.
And as the shift toward e-books becomes more pronounced, its high street stores will be more valuable as a marketing tool, he notes. Eventually, even the shop tills could become redundant.
Book publishing is just one of many industries facing a tidal wave of operational data that poses a golden opportunity. If businesses can collate, process and analyse that data, they can detect and exploit trends to stay ahead of the market.
That data explosion, and the new generation of technologies required to make use of it, is what the IT industry now commonly refers to as ‘big data’.
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