The front page of StatReport displays a list of ebooks for each ebook family.

The following change will soon be released in StatReport:

If an ebook family has more than 4 ebooks, the link "[more ebooks]" will appear after the fourth ebook. When you click on this link, the rest of the ebooks in the family will appear. The link will then turn into "[less ebooks]". When that is pressed the list shrinks to the original size.

This change will make long lists of ebooks much more managable and make the page load faster.

A separate change that recently occurred is the added [view] link that has been added to the list of ebooks on the front page. These link to where a specific ebook is on the web.

Every ebook has a landing page or a registration page. These pages are integrated into the sites they are part of. These pages are served by an ebookhost web server.

The ebook registration/landing pages are designed to look and be a part of websites.

For instance the ebooks on the techlearning.com website all have the design of the techlearning website, but if you look at the URL of a techlearning ebook registration page and compare it to other techlearning webpages, you will see that the ebook URLs are a lot different. Here's a techlearning ebook registration page URL: http://newbay.ebookhost.net/tl/atomic/1/ and here is a regular techlearning webpage URL: http://techlearning.com/content/epubs/index.php

Recently, at the request of a customer, registration dates were added to ebook reports. Now when you generate a report of all users for a specific ebook using StatReport, included in the data is the date each user registered or first gained access to that ebook.

These reports are also now automatically sorted by user-registration date. Newest users at the top.

Along with eBooks, comes StatReport, which is a data collection, reporting and statistics system for eBooks. StatReport provides all kinds of data about ebooks, like how many people have registered to see any ebook, the number of page views of each ebook page/spread, how many times an ebook has been opened etc.

Recently some bugs were fixed in StatReport.
Here's a list of them:

• Some eProofer links were broken. All of them were fixed today.
• Generating a report in excel providing all REO registered ebook users was broken. It was a setting in an underlying script setting the wrong amount of memory to be used. Fixed yesterday.

Introduction:

My name is Nick Mudge. I work at Minnick Web Services, primary working on eBookhost software, fixing bugs, adding features, answering people's questions about the software etc.

So if you have any questions or suggestions or notice anything that should be improved or fixed, or just want to tell me something, than here's my email address: nick@minnickweb.com, or leave a comment on this blog.

New Feature: Inbound Link Tracking
What it is: Records and reports the sources of inbound links
How does it work: Simply append "?linkcode=[yourlinkname]" to an inbound link to your ebook. For example, if your eBook is at http://demo.ebookhost.net/demo/ebook/1/, you could track an inbound link from an email by linking to it using http://demo.ebookhost.net/demo/ebook/1/?linkcode=emaillink. Track as many different links as you like!
Benefit to the customer: Allows you to see how people are getting to your eBook.

Web site and electronic publication service provider Minnick Web Services (MWS) increased eBook sales by 84 percent in 2006. eBook hosting sales also increased in 2006, by 91 percent.

"Our substantial increase in eBook sales in 2006 shows that electronic publications are maturing into an integral part of the publishing world. It’s still a new format that a minority of publishers are using, but it is becoming more widespread and accepted," said CEO Christopher J. Minnick.

Unlike other digital magazine producers, Minnick Web Services doesn't simply convert a printed magazine to an online format. MWS works with the publishing team to create a custom product that's designed to be read online, doesn't require scrolling, and has an extremely simple user interface.

Now MinnickWeb clients can watch the status of their projects as they progress from the beginning stages to completion, in one handy, informative page. This new, free service improves communication, and allows our clients to launch their eBooks whenever they desire. Ask about eLauncher for your next project!

First of all, Margaret and I will be attending the Folio Show in New York October 23-25. If you'd like to schedule a meeting with us during that time, please email or call me. Many of our clients are in the NY area, and many others will be in town for Folio that week. We're hoping to get a chance to visit with as many of you as possible.

In other news: we're continuing to roll out new features for the eBookhost system. The biggest changes have been to the tools we use to produce eBooks. These improvements have made it possible for us to produce more eBooks in the last 2 months than in the 6 months prior to that.

This week, we rolled out a few new reports for you to become familiar with and love!

1. Clickthrough ratio: in the Clickthrough report, we're now calculating the ratio of Clicks to visitors for each ad.

2. Page view time! In the page view report, you can now see how many seconds, on average, people spent on each page spread.

3. Engagement Factor. We used the formula: (visits/visitors)*duration to compute an Engagement Factor (EF). Engagement is one of those things where no one has really come up with a standard definition yet, but I read about this formula somewhere and it seems useful as a gauge of how valuable people find each page. This is displayed (along with a cool graph) in the page view report.