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...

Five Slightly Unexpected Tips For Self-Published Authors to Find Success (DBW) The Crazy Plan to Save Barnes & Noble (DBW) "Used Ebooks" Hurts My Brain (Book Riot) Little, Brown's NOVL Approach to Reaching Readers Online (Publisher's Weekly) Is "Discoverability" Even A Problem? (Brett Sandusky) Kindle Daily Deals: The Informationist by Taylor Stevens (and 3 others)...

Bookish has launched with much fanfare. Some good. Some bad. Nate over at The Digital Reader had an amusing look at their terms of service. DBW has three reasons they will succeed and three reasons they will fail. Hedging their bets much? So I decided to try using the site and assess it from a usability perspective. The first thing I tried didn't work out so well. There's a big box in the middle of the page that says "Enter a Book." I assumed I would enter a book title and get some recommendations based on that title. Failing that, I thought at...

We've written a bit about the Berlin-based startup Readmill in the past; here's a Q&A-style interview we ran back in August 2012 with Henrik Berggren, the company's über-ambitious founder. As we wrote in the introduction to that interview: The easiest way to understand exactly what Readmill is and what exactly it can do for you is to watch the simple introductory video on the company’s homepage. To put it simply, though, Readmill is something like a social networking site for the sorts of readers who like to share what they’re reading, and who like to discover what their friends are reading, too. The latest news...

  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...

If you're the type who regularly follows international news of the ever-expanding e-book scene, you may have already heard about the unusual business collaboration between the Italian book publishing company known as RSC Libri, and the Italian train company, ITV. The partnership, which was announced at The Bookseller's FutureBook 2012 conference in London, and which has been dubbed E-books Aboard!, "will give passengers on Italian trains free access [to] e-books," according to The Bookseller. The general idea, as the post explains, is "to study the way consumers read and discover digital content." Assuming the experiment leads to any particularly eye-opening findings, it'll probably be...