This week, in the space of a couple of days, I dropped in at Digital Book World and was invited to a dinner sponsored by Human 1.0  and DataXu (like Zoo). What’s the common theme? Analytics and Big Data.

Or, as Publisher’s Weekly put it in a Digital Book World overview: Consumers, Data, and Analytics in the Digital Book Era. The gist of what we talked about at dinner and at DBW is that we (and I mean everyone, not just publishers) are creating more and more data through our online activities–whether creating, purchasing or reading an eBook, browsing a website, tweeting, or posting a blog. Over time this adds up to petabytes and petabytes of data–big data–that a company can collect and could run through an analytics package. (DataXu provides one of these packages focused on Digital Marketing Management.)

This huge amount of data can be completely overwhelming. Lots of people I know are used to managing finite data points (small data) via spreadsheets and backward-looking reports. Having access to big data can be overwhelming. So while some publishers collect a lot of data, I haven’t seen many that have moved over into true analytics. Near real-time analytics could be a game changer for those publishers that want to build a deeper understanding of their eBook customer.

Why is this good? When your customer spends more and more time online and buys online–especially if they buy a digital product like an eBook–it becomes easier to collect and use consumer behavior to create effective marketing than it used to be. In the old days, a marketing manager might hang around a bookstore and watch as consumers flipped through books. At best, that yields anecdotal information. It might be better than nothing, but it’s not that much better.

So, it’s great to see the potential for big data discussed in industry forums especially as relates to digital marketing and eBook publishing. This year, it seems like retailers–B&N and Amazon in particular–have figured out the importance of using analytic tools to better reach eBook readers. I hope next year we’ll see more publishers talking about how their marketing and product development have been changed by customer insights developed through analytics.