While Simon & Schuster has placed particular emphasis on online video, other publishers are also using it as a promotional tool. Reading community site Goodreads has its own video section, and website Book Riot has a separate section for book trailers. Readers and fans have come to expect “readily available and entertaining information both about their favorite authors and those they’re considering reading,” said Simon & Schuster EVP and chief digital officer Ellie Hirschhorn. “Video is now a critical part of that mix.”

Since many web users search for topics, not individual titles, Simon & Schuster has created three video channels that will appear on Roku and Blinkx. Two of the channels, “Tips on Healthy Living” and “Tips on Life and Love,” focus on videos from lifestyle and relationship authors (and have corresponding blogs), while “Book Stew” features author interviews for pop culture and general interest books.

Hirschhorn said Simon & Schuster’s most popular videos have been Walter Isaacson speaking on his book Steve Jobs (13,562 views on YouTube) and a book trailer for Hunger Games parody The Hunger Pains (over 1.5 million views on YouTube). The most successful videos, she said, provide “entertainment that is not an advertisement,” and tend to be under two minutes long.

Simon & Schuster is adding QR codes to the back jackets of all its hardcover and trade paperback titles starting this fall. The publisher hopes to use the the codes to build direct-to-consumer relationships, but will readers actually scan them?

Twenty-six percent of Simon & Schuster’s sales are now digital, and the QR codes are seen as a way to link digital and print. The codes “make it easy for consumers to visit our site and hopefully subscribe to one of our newsletters,” S&S chief digital officer Ellie Hirschhorn wrote in a recent email to employees. Scanning the QR code on a book ”will bring the consumer to the author’s mobile page on S&S.com where they can sign up for an email, browse the author’s other books and watch video.” Jackets will also include a printed link to the author’s website “so consumers without smartphones or QR scanners could still easily find the author’s page.”

S&S says consumers can use any QR scanner to read the codes. The company will track the number of scans for each title.

Will readers actually scan the codes?

As my colleague Erica Ogg recently reported:

While QR codes are popular in places like Japan, they haven’t caught on in the U.S. yet. The ability to scan these codes is almost universal in smartphones thanks to apps and built-in scanners, but people are just not embracing them: Bloomberg Businessweek recently reported that just 5 percent of Americans scanned a QR code last summer, even though the codes are popping up in 8 percent of print ads.

In the piece linked to above, Bloomberg Businessweek quotes a digital ad agency director who says, “Very few people want to visit your corporate website to begin with. Fewer want to do it when they’re out in the world or reading a magazine.” The article also says that fewer ad agencies are using QR codes these days since customers don’t seem to care about them.

Simon & Schuster’s QR code initiative probably isn’t expensive and it’s worth a try. But it remains to be seen whether readers really care about checking out an author page on a publisher website. And readers who try to scan the codes in bookstores will likely get frowns from booksellers who think they’re using a barcode scanner like Amazon’s price check app to find a cheaper price online.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / gualtiero boffi

Speaking at the paidContent 2011 conference, Guenther addressed the difficulties in dealing not just with the Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Android and Apple platforms, but the fact that publishers have to choose between offering one or a mix of formats for their content. “Some will want their digital content produced for Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE), some will just want html5,” he said. “The balkanization makes it difficult and challenging as publishers try to reach consumers.”

But in Ongo CEO Alex Kazim‘s view, the mess of choices is actually a good thing. That is to say, the situation for publishers might be worse if there were a seamless, single option at this point. “Balkanization is a good thing,” Kazim told panel moderator James L. McQuivey, VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester. “I can buy my music on iTunes, listen on Pandora, Spotify. If iTunes had been created by the music industry instead of Apple, they wouldn’t have sold individual songs. They would only sell albums. In news, it’s going to be ad based models, subscription based models. Ultimately, that will benefit consumers, and publishers in turn.”

Both Next Issue and Ongo have faced doubters about their models — the former is the magazine and newspaper JV charged with creating a single storefront for digital sales and subscriptions, while the latter aggregates online news. In Ongo’s case, even though it launched barely a month ago, Kazim is constantly asked how many subscribers the company has under its belt. In the case of Next Issue, it has taken some hits for moving too slowly.

“The media industry is a glass house,” said Guenther. “Next Issue was formed 15 months ago and when I got here less than a year ago, there was a lot of focus on research on technology and consumer habits. There was not a lot of execution before I got here. The idea I had was to meld Silicon Valley.. we’re not going to be a system integrator and we were going to develop a product. There were no product people when I got here. I constantly hear, ‘You’re late, Apple owns the market.’ These are still early days.”