As the book industry continues its transition to digital delivery, the term "Big Data" has been showing up in discussions of publishing strategies going forward. Yesterday the Book Industry Study Group's Annual Making Information Pay conference, held at the McGraw-Hill Auditorium in Manhattan, offered a program that outlined the broad nature of Big Data -- the ability to "tame vast amounts of data," according to keynote speaker Jake Freivald of Information Builders -- how to manage it and how Big Data can help publishers run their businesses more efficiently.

While Freivald's presentation provided a broad conceptual outline of Big Data and how businesses can effectively make use of a growing and vast amount of raw data, another presentation by Peter Collingridge, founder of the U.K. digital vendor Bookseer, offered a presentation on what he called "little data," that seemed a bit more easily comprehensible and applicable to the classic trade book marketing problem -- how do you know if your marketing and promotional campaigns are working?

Big Data is a bit of a catchall phrase to indicate the ever-increasing amount of raw data and information generated by digital networks, sensors and data capturing technology...

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