BookGlutton has a new bookstore. BG’s news release follows. – Paul Biba
BookGlutton.com, an online reading website that integrates community with books, has launched an online bookstore featuring technology publisher O’Reilly Media’s newest titles. Beginning today, visitors to the site will be able to browse over 500 O’Reilly titles, read them online together, and share annotations about them.
The addition of an e-commerce platform expands BookGlutton’s catalog beyond public domain titles. “Since launch we’ve steadily worked on building out an e-commerce system that integrates with our social network.” said co-founder and CTO Aaron Miller. “We’ve also signed deals with a number of small publishing houses, and we’ll be rolling out new books from them over the coming months.” Previously, BookGlutton has partnered with other content providers like Random House and Feedbooks.com for free and promotional material.
To see the new BookGlutton store click on the “Books” link on BookGlutton.com. Genres include short fiction, technology, and science fiction, among others.
BookGlutton.com offers an online-only reading experience. Anyone can preview a sample section of a book and use the community features inside, which include chatting with others inside the chapter of the book or attaching margin notes to any paragraph. To access the whole book, users click a buy button embedded inside the text. “This creates
an interesting opportunity for people to discuss books – people who have bought the whole book and people who are reading a sample passage can communicate together in that preview section – word of mouth promotion can take place inside the book itself,” said Travis Alber, BookGlutton’s president.
“Our users are constantly requesting new material, so we’re always looking for new publishing partners,” said Miller. He added that BookGlutton is standards-based, web-based, DRM-free, and uses the new EPUB digital book format that the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Lexcycle’s Stanza platforms use.
