Long a dream of cost-cutting publishers and readers who fantasize about the perfect electronic search for forthcoming galleys, the digital book catalog is finally becoming an industry reality. HarperCollins has gone completely digital with its Fall 2009 catalog, to be followed by the Random House imprints in Spring 2010 (except for the typically exceptionalist Knopf Group, which will wait until Summer 2010). And most major houses now offer digital catalogs alongside their printed ones.
But for booksellers, reviewers, librarians and other professional readers, the question remains: how to aggregate and manage all this book information, and (dream of dreams!) even create one’s own customized catalog of key titles?
Buzz is building that one good answer may be Edelweiss, the digital catalog interface created by Above the Treeline, the retail sales data system widely used by independent booksellers. To find out more, I recently walked through the site with my friend and neighbor Ted Hill, who’s working on the Edelweiss sales strategy. (Yes, we sang a few bars of the eponymous song from The Sound of Music – who could resist?)
Overall, I was quite impressed with Edelweiss’s features, especially since Above the Treeline only started developing it last summer. Beyond a doubt, it’s far more user-friendly than anything else currently available (e.g. searching Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Ingram for forthcoming titles, as I often do now). But (spoiler alert) I’m not quite ready to say that Edelweiss is ultimate digital book catalog interface for reviewers - yet.
Before I explain why, here’s a quick overview of what Edelweiss can do:
Current Features:
- Available catalogs include: Chronicle, Hachette, HarperCollins, Ingram, John Wiley, Penguin, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Thomas Nelson and Tyndale (This leaves out Houghton/Harcourt, Hyperion, Macmillan, Norton, Perseus, Scholastic and any other publisher aside from the 10 above — but more are likely to sign on in the next year, as Edelweiss builds its publisher base.)
- Edelweiss is searchable across publishers and categories.
- Searchable categories include: 50 nonfiction categories, plus fiction and juvenile fiction, poetry and drama. You can also search by pub date and print run (though I couldn’t figure out if it was possible to do both at the same time — it would be very handy if so).
- Keyword search runs on subtitle, book description, author bio, quotes, and excerpt fields. You can also search on more than one keyword, to find African American memoirs, for example. Another great feature is the overview that tells you where a particular keyword shows up - e.g. if you search for “Chicago,” the overview will tell you that the word appears in the title of X books, in the author bios of Y books and in the catalog copy for Z books in a given range– and you can click through to each group.
- It’s quick and easy to browse for both basic information and detailed title information
- It’s customizable, so you can save and print your own list of titles (although I couldn’t figure out how to do this right away – will need to noodle with it some more)
- Personal notes can be typed in and saved by individual users
- Title info is updated in real time
- It’s available for free to non-booksellers (without access to sales or ordering info seen by booksellers who subscribe to Above the Treeline)
So it’s really pretty good. But here’s where it could be improved for professional readers:
- The categories are not sophisticated enough for narrow searches and using additional keyword searches doesn’t always streamline the process. You can search the ”fiction” category, but you can’t sort for popular sub-categories like romance or mysteries without doing a keyword search–but since keyword searches include book descriptions and excerpts, you may get some books with the word “romance” in their catalog copy that aren’t relevant to your search. Similarly, there’s no gay or lesbian category, such as that found on Amazon and Ingram, and searching by keyword doesn’t necessarily pull up all relevant titles.
- The workflow is tailored to the publisher-sale rep relationship and doesn’t take into account that reviewers may want to search on non-traditional categories, such as “celebrity books.”
Anyone else out there seen Edelweiss yet? If not, I strongly recommend you visit the Above the Treeline booth at BEA and check it out. Let me know your thoughts–and I’ll share more of mine as I experiment with it a little more, and discover its intricacies. Watch this space!
I find that most searches are great for casual users, not so great for power searchers. But, it still sounds like an awesome tool and a huge step in the right direction.
salivating ala Homer Simpson at prospect of CUSTOMIZED CATALOG (which for me means, all of Chronicle, and a whole heck of a lot of small and univ. press titles)!
Just checked Bookselling this Week (http://news.bookweb.org/news/6802.html) and they had info on Above the Treeline/Edelweiss demos at BEA:
Ongoing Edelweiss demonstrations will be presented at the Above the Treeline booth (#4130) on the exhibit floor. Additional demonstrations will be held on Friday and Saturday mornings from 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. in Room 1E02 on the lower concourse (just down the hall from the ABA Lounge).
COOLIO! Thanks for this post, Charlotte. It would be fantastic to see the “missing” features you mentioned incorporated into Edelweiss (and maybe also some of the gorgeous design elements I love oh so much in print catalogs somehow translated into the digi-catalogs like this).
Oh, and won’t it be cool when NetGalley is linked in to Edelweiss? Maybe I said too much?
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