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)  ...

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...

  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...

Barnes & Noble’s new Nook HD tablets, priced starting at $199, aim to stand out from the pack with reader-centric features and enhanced reading experiences for magazines and catalogs. The company’s goal is to drive book discovery and purchasing through the tablets in new ways. Barrnes & Noble’s two new Android Wi-Fi tablets, the 7-inch Nook HD and 9-inch Nook HD+, aim to compete with other moderately priced tablets such as Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Google’s Nexus 7. But the new Nook tablets, starting at $199 and available in October, differentiate themselves most from competitors when it comes to some new...

Those of you who work professionally in the publishing biz have probably been reading, hearing and talking about the art and science of 'e-book discovery' for years now; it's been a slowing growing industry trend for as long as I can remember. But unless I've suddenly been stricken with a nasty case of Baader-Meinhof Syndrome, the so-called 'discovery' concept has absolutely exploded lately: Everyone in the book world, it seems, is talking about it. Why is that? The best explanation, as far as I can tell, is that book publishing itself has exploded—e-book publishing especially—now that we all live in the Age of...

I ran across another one of those guest posts on Publishing Perspectives where the founder of a publishing-related business is invited to talk about the idea behind that business. This one seems to involve a method for enabling discovery of new books in the age of the e-book. Small Demons, explains CEO Valla Vakili, was born out of enjoying a book and wanting to go out and experience some of the things and places written about in that book. Then it occurred to him that links to other people, places, and things, including other books, can be found in...

Amazon has settled a 2009 patent lawsuit from Discovery, the company behind the Discovery Channel, the Military Channel, and others, PaidContent reports. (We mentioned the lawsuit here and here.) The patent, filed for in 1999 and granted in 2007, had to do with e-book copy protection and secure distribution. Although Discovery does not itself have anything to do with e-books, its founder, John Hendricks, is an amateur inventor who dabbled in e-book digitization and distribution. The details of the settlement will remain private and confidential (as they usually do), but it seems clear Amazon’s Kindle sales have reached the...

Edward Nawotka has a new article at Publishing Perspectives that answers some common questions about metadata in digital books, and I thought he made a particularly good point regarding where it belongs in a publishing workflow: Q: Isn't metadata just something the digital departments of publishers need to worry about? A: Simply put, it needs to be a part of everyone's job description. The problem comes when a house instills a "digital director" and everyone else starts to think "well, that's not my job anymore." Metadata is a tool that everyone can use to help make a book a success and keep...