Bookish and deep book introspection

There has been a slew of new approaches to book discovery and sales over the last year. Even as Barnes & Noble stores are staring down extinction and Amazon is dominating the online market, upstart companies are coming out with an amazing array of alternatives.

What fascinates me the most about all of them is how they treat the question of discovering new books. For me, the Amazon recommendation engine that is based on "Those who bought this, also bought this" is decent, but basing everything around sales numbers ends up being a circle that feeds itself. Social sites for books are good, but they require a lot of time to get started and find the right people to listen to for your kind of books. I'm hoping the Netflix, Spotify, and Pandora of books will deliver on the enticing promise of streaming books by subscription. But it's not happening yet.

What is happening is a new site called Bookish. Bookish is a bookstore with a focus on discovering and sharing new titles. It has partnerships with many of the large publishing houses, so one of the big things that makes it stand out is that it will offer some exclusive content that won't be available anywhere else. In addition, the founding editor has a history at MediaBistro and The Daily Beast, so the editorial content should be stellar.

The standout feature for me is what Digital Book World says Bookish calls "deep book introspection," which combines what a new reader says they like with book metadata.

As Bookish gathers user data — users can enter books they've read, books they've liked and book they’d like to read in addition to purchasing books — it will begin to add that knowledge into its recommendations.

I like that as a concept. It's a little more flexible to allow readers to say what they like the most rather than basing recommendations just on what you purchased or what you've rated during the time you've spent on a given site.

What do you think? Will deep book introspection work better than what we have now?

Screen shot courtesy of author.