Atria Books Releases First SmartBook
Atria Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, launched a new experiment last week.The first thousand hardback copies of The Impulse Economy will have a little something extra.
If you find one on a bookstore shelf, whip out your NFC (near field commincation) enabled smartphone and hold it near the book. Each of the thousand copies will have an embedded RFID tag. With the right smartphone you’ll be able to scan the tag and be directed to a website that has content related to the book.
“The smart book allows the physical book to become interactive for both the book buyer and the book browser,” says Judith Curr, Executive Vice President and Publisher of Atria Books. “The reader can tap to rich interactive content on their phone. The goal is to engage the consumer and start a permission-based two-way relationship that may lead to the sale of this book or further sales in this category of interest.”
This book is about how consumers make impulse purchases, and that adds a certain relevance to the RFID tag. The tech isn’t new and the idea of finding related content online is also old. But Atria Books is offering readers a way to impulsively check for more info, which fits with the topic of the book. This is a rather clever marketing idea, isn’t it?
