L.J. Sellers has picked up on a trend on Amazon. The novelist who writes for the Crime Fiction Collective blog noticed old books popping up on lists for new releases. If the book has been out for several years, how can it become a “hot, new release?” Sellers writes: “The newest trend I've noticed is the republishing of the same book. What I see happening is that familiar books that were competitive on Amazon's crime fiction list, dropped off the list, then came roaring back with a new pub date and a high profile.” Essentially, publishers or authors are re-releasing e-books with a new publishing date, and...

In today's Morning Links was a great essay from Michael Kozlowski on the 'death' of the indie e-bookstore. Books on Board was killed by the agency pricing model, and a failure to innovate and provide better customer experiences such as mobile browsing and more refined search algorithms, Kozlowski alleges. His conclusion, in particular, jumped out at me: "Indie bookseller websites are less about just selling books in the traditional sense, and more about reaching the largest audience you can. There is room in the industry for smaller players, but they have to be savvy. Opening up a Facebook Book Store, developing apps, making a...

On the advice of a TeleRead commenter, I've spent the last two weeks trying out a book recommending service called Book Bub. So far, I'm enjoying it. Book Bub's premise is simple: When you register (it's free), you select from an offering of genres that interest you, and every day, Book Bub sends you an email with a few free or discounted books in your chosen genres. That's all there is to it. In general, I'm finding Book Bub's one, single email a bit easier for me to keep track of than a blog these days—I still haven't decided what I plan...

While it’s odd to think of an organization backed by the  Penguin, Hachette and Simon & Schuster as a startup, Bookish, the new book-recommendation and -discovery site is essentially that. After two years in development under three CEOs, Bookish is now a reality, a place where users can get recommendations—based on titles or groups of titles they know they already like—and then, importantly, purchase them. Like the Random House project BookScout, the idea, on one level, is to facilitate discovery across the industry, for the good of the industry. And while users can discover just about any book, the books they can purchase...

E-book discovery by readers has been much in the news lately, and it's definitely an issue for authors, especially those who are self-published. While readers continue to find their next great book in online stores, some still browse brick and mortar bookstores. Wouldn't it be nice if they could find and buy e-books in a store? No, not showrooming Books-A-Million to buy a book on Amazon. Buy actually buying the e-book in the store, so that the author and the store both make money on the deal. Bitingduck Press has an answer. It's still new, so don't look for it yet...

Here's the problem with publishers' book discovery problem (Paid Content) Why Stephen King was wrong to publish 'Guns' as a Kindle Single (NY Daily News) Amazon to Investigate Claims of Worker Intimidation at German Centers (New York  Times) Publishing is tough these days — unless you're in nautical almanacs, apparently (The Guardian) Kindle Daily Deals: 'Beautiful Creatures' books for $2.99 (and 3 others)  ...

The book is written. It’s for sale on your website, on Amazon, or wherever you think people will look. So, how do you get people to buy? Getting through the noise can be difficult. That’s where Publisher’s Portal hopes to jump in. It’s a Web-based company looking to distribute excerpts of books for a small fee. With discoverability a current hot topic in the digital publishing world, Publisher’s Portal hopes to tap into the market by creating an excerpt from a book's first chapter (or its first 17,000 words), and then sending it to library catalogs, online retailers and book distributors. The excerpts are searchable by...

TeleRead posted earlier about an idea that was floated by Victoria Barnsley, a HarperCollins CEO, during a recent NPR interview: the idea of charging people for the privilege of browsing in bookstores. The idea was that they'd pay to browse, and then go home and order online from the vendor of their choosing. The analogy Barnsley gave with this was that of a high-end clothing store—say, for wedding dresses—charging a nominal trying fee that is taken out of the cost of your purchase. But I think that analogy is a faulty one, and I think the true analogy demonstrates why 'pay...

  By Brian Howard Last week, following a soft-launch the week prior, Random House marched out BookScout, a Facebook app designed to link readers with books they'll like but might not have discovered on their own. The recommendation engine draws on a user's "likes"—both on one's Facebook timeline and then directly through the app. Intriguingly, BookScout is not purely a Random House recommendation engine—it'll tip readers to any book in print, regardless of whether it was published by its own imprint Knopf, Big Six rival HarperCollins, indie McSweeney's or even Amazon Publishing. Though the app's early reviews have been mixed (I've found its recommendations to...

By Rob Suggs So many public domain e-texts, so little time—and guidance. That there's the rub. Ever had this happen? You spot an intriguing title in the Gutenberg feed, or on some other free text site. New e-reader food? Maybe. What's the book about? Like all public domain texts, it dates before the Great Rise of the Subtitles, sadly. So this thing is merely called "The Amazingly Indescribable Thing," or something equally vague, by Lucius Q. Oldenscribe. The cover is a photo of a ragged, black-clothed library book with that title. By sheer reflex, your eager little fingers are instantly Googling title and...