Episode 6: Clay Tablets and Metadata Overwriting

The BookSmarts Podcast, with Joshua Tallent

This episode starts with a story about clay tablets and builds a connection all the way up to a modern metadata issue.

The story is about how a team of researchers utilized cutting edge mathematics to trace the trade itineraries and sales transactions left behind by Assyrian merchants 4,000 years ago. Using this information, the team was able to determine the location of cities that were hidden to time, and were able to find corollaries between the size of those ancient cities and those same cities today. This is a fascinating look at how data can change the way you look at issues. You can read the paper here: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23992/w23992.pdf

This story is a great example of what can happen when you take a more data-centric approach to an issue. As many publishers have learned over the last decade, taking better control of your data is imperative to your success. The best way to do that is with a title performance monitoring tool.

One important issue that impacts publishers every day, often without them even knowing it, is data overwriting. Joshua talks extensively about this issue, and provides listeners with five suggestions to help them more effectively deal with their book data being overwritten.