Case Study: Largest Paperback Publisher Company boosts conversion with Crossing Minds

Largest Paperback Publisher Company - Customer Case Study

Largest Paperback Publisher Company, one of the world’s largest paperback publishers and a division of Bertelsmann, needed to improve email-driven engagement and sales while keeping readers aware of new releases. Facing sparse implicit feedback, a large catalog, and strong competition from Amazon, the publisher turned to Crossing Minds and its machine learning recommendation product to deliver more personalized book suggestions.

Crossing Minds analyzed and enriched the publisher’s data with user and item embeddings, combined multiple internal datasets, and leveraged additional training signals to improve recommendations and address the cold start problem. The result was significantly better recommendation accuracy, with AUC rising from 71.1% with LightFM to 92.4% with Crossing Minds, while also reducing false negative rate from 26.5% to 24.7%; this led to higher conversion, greater engagement, and lower unsubscribe rates.