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...

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  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...

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