Book Discoverability

For the longest time, part of the value of booksellers lay in personal service, where knowledgeable, well-read staff engaged with customers and helped them to find new books based on what they had previously read and enjoyed. The way booksellers have store layout down to an exact science, exciting displays, and reader events all play a role in what is now seemingly becoming a few simple, autonomous, algorithmic calculations: The discoverability of books. Where does the digitization of this crucial role leave booksellers and librarians – the traditional navigators of the bookish realm?

Traditionally, the “discoverability” of books depended on various factors as mentioned above – personal service, tactile browsing and attention grabbing devices such as cleverly planned displays. Today, however, with the power of the internet and social networks, it would seem that discoverability is about much, much more than this – from simple “book club” type recommendations to very complicated “like for like” algorithms. It is all about engaging readers, and then getting them to purchase the particular book they’ve engaged with. It is the essence of bookselling and all every online retailer is trying so desperately to master.

The issue is so pressing that it took up an entire morning at the recent Digital Book World Conference. Peter Hildick-Smith, CEO of the Codex group, reminded attendees that “while online retailers are great for buying, physical bookstores, despite their decline, remain the best vehicle for both discoverability and conversion.”

There are more books available now to more people at a lower cost than any time in history and in order to assist the reading public in finding their next fix online, a whole new sector of the industry has opened up to quick- and clever thinking developers.
Jellybooks, a free, publisher sponsored, service for exploring, sampling and sharing books is very user friendly; Libboo activates and incentivizes networks of influencers through a reward system; Small Demons connects all the details of all the books we read into a connected web of information; Zola is a new e-bookseller that intends to be a more effective book recommendation engine than Amazon, and that is to mention but a few. There are many more.

“There is one book-focused start-up that has arguably had the largest effect on changing how people discover new books: Goodreads,” says Jeremy Greenfield in an article on Discoverability on Digital Book World.

“Goodreads is like Facebook, but for books. It’s a social network that allows users to track their reading, share recommendations with friends and even form virtual book clubs. It has 12 million registered users – small by social networking standards, but a number that should have publishers salivating considering it’s pure book-reading folks who are eager to share their reading life. Not to mention that it’s nearly doubled in a year and grown by 2 million users since August 2012.”
He quotes Goodreads’ CEO Otis Chandler as saying that “What you’re starting to see is the value of niche social networks and communities and there are many of these that are actually plugging into other social networks such as Facebook”. Goodreads is the largest book related application (app) on Facebook.

“Everything we’re doing is working on better discovery – creating better tools to help readers find new books,” continues Chandler.
“We’re entirely focused on getting a person excited enough about a book so that they go home and read it. A recommendation from a friend is all you might need – if it’s a good friend.”

One of the latest sites which is creating a lot of buzz is Bookish, with approximately 2 million ISBNs from 19 publishers, and a search recommendation function that its founders hope will make it easier for consumers to discover books, reports Jim Millot on Publishers Weekly.

“To help draw traffic to the Web site, Bookish will feature exclusive content about books and authors and will work with USA Today to integrate Bookish into the newspaper’s book page site,” he adds.
Ardy Khazaei, who took over as CEO in October, said the site has been designed “to provide as many pathways to [book] discovery as possible.” There are about 400,000 author profile pages as well as title pages for all books on the site and Bookish allows consumers to search for books in 18 major categories. Reviews from PW are also featured and customers can add reviews and rate titles as well. Khazaei noted that to interact on the site, customers first must register, something that he believes will limit the number of reviews from readers with agendas. In addition, Bookish features a book recommendation tool that will look to recommend the “next read” for consumers. The tool has been developed by a team led by Karen Sun, Recommendations Data Scientist at Bookish. A graduate of MIT and self-described bibliophile, Sun said the recommendation tool will use a host of factors to find books that may interest readers. Customers can type in as many as four books that they like and Bookish will find recommendations by “deconstructing” the book, Sun said, taking into account such things as editorial themes, reviews, editor insights and awards.

The Nudge launched a free iPad app in January called The Nudge List, designed to help book lovers uncover the best new books and book-based information, with specialist advertising opportunities for publishers.
Updated weekly with the ten best, most interesting and most entertaining stories from the world of books and film, The Nudge List will highlight major new releases and word-of-mouth success stories, as well as championing mid-list titles worthy of wider exposure. It will feature reviews, trailers, book extracts,
author interviews and other great content from Nudge (www.nudgemenow.com), including direct links to sample and purchase all featured titles as e books on the iBookstore
The website facilitates a combination of direct access to all types of book lovers, link backs to publisher websites for data collection, and opportunities to seed promotional content on a consumer-specific platform,” claimed the company in a press release on launch.

In December 2012, Publishers Lunch launched Bookateria with Random House. Ed Nawotka reviewed it on Publishing Perspectives, saying that “while its potential to become the “go-to” bookstore for a broad array of consumers looks to be limited, it appears to be a helpful tool for those in the industry as they seek out the titles they are reading about online.

Of course, this also raises one important question: if many people in the industry already get most of the books they want from their other friends in the business, who is Bookateria going to sell to?”
“We know from our readers that every new deal report and daily news item triggers purchase impulses among our audience, who are avid book consumers,” PublishersMarketplace.com and Publishers Lunch founder Michael Cader said. “So we’ve long been looking for a solution that lets us connect the news and our proprietary data directly to a store environment to drive book sales, while supporting the entire bookselling environment, without favouring any one party or competing directly with booksellers who provide such a valuable service.”

Yet another contender is iDreambooks started by Canadian entrepreneur Rahul Simha, reviewed by Daniel Kalder on Publishing Perspectives. It promises to collate reviews from “reputable sources,” thus helping readers make the best purchasing decisions. The discovery-friendly design is something Simha stresses, comparing it favourably to both Goodreads and Amazon. “They’re built for search, not discovery. Goodreads has the black box where they might recommend a book based on your taste, but on our site you stare directly at the books. It gives you a bird’s eye view of what’s out there, and you don’t get that on other sites.”

“When it comes to book discovery, things are going to get more complicated before they get simpler,” says Jeremy Greenfield on Digital Book World.

“Reader behaviour is in flux and the ways in which people engage with and discover new content has grown exponentially.”
Quoting data from Bowker, Greenfield says that in 2011, nearly half of consumers changed their book-buying behaviour. Almost 39% of books are sold online, 26% in stores, the rest in up to 44 different ways.

For instance, tablet owners discover new books through free excerpts about 15% of the time; but readers of young adult fiction discover new books through the same way about 6% of the time. So marketers of young adult fiction have a lot to think about when they want to reach readers who read on tablets.

Developing these sites is an exercise in big data collection and mining, a skill which will no doubt become more refined as time goes on until people trust the recommendations of the websites as much as they would those of a good friend. For now, however, amid all the change in how readers read and discover books, one thing has remained constant: in-person, personal recommendations and tactile browsing and paging – especially for picture books – are the number one way people discover books no matter who they are or how they read.
These portals are an exciting new addition to the bookselling realm though and one can certainly get lost in their digital shelves for many an hour.

Jessica Faircliff