Matching Books and Readers: Publishers Need Better Websites

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Darkness moves by Wendy Heldmann

To continue on some of the points brought up in last week’s post on the Future of Entertainment 3: why are publishers’ websites so difficult to navigate? There is plenty of “content” — author interviews and videos, RSS feeds by subject — but nothing to match a reader with a book depending on her taste.

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A bookstore (a good bookstore) is fun to browse because of the care employees take in displaying titles they believe buyers will appreciate. Many small bookstores have wonderful websites, because they are suited to a particular audience. However, publishers do very little to curate their inventory.

Even Amazon is difficult to navigate. Although their recommendation agent has had access to my buying habits for nearly ten years, it still doesn’t know me very well and is like some guy at a bar, “Hey, I know you! Jessica? Ugh, Jen? Samantha?” (Yes, I bought a Graham Greene book last year. I’m not impressed it believes I would also like all twenty of Graham Greene’s other novels.)

Good interactive websites do not require the most expensive UX designers. It takes creativity– silly gimmicks and fun. What about an eHarmony parody that asks MBTI-type questions and answers with several suggested books for your “type”?

These websites forget the goal of the visitor: which is to find a book that speaks to him or her. Publishers need to think about readers as individuals.

As it happens this reader is a freelance book critic. I write about a half dozen reviews a years, and would double that if it were easier to learn about new releases. To pitch a review for a magazine, I like to know about a book a few months before it is released so the review will be timely. But I rarely receive any kind of notices from publishers. The effort to find books relevant to my interest is often too time-consuming. In contrast, I get lots of screener offers from documentary/indie film distributors even though I rarely write about film.

I’m a little surprised my name isn’t in some kind of Excel spreadsheet with the publications I write for and the types of books I typically review (popular science, technology, art, often female-penned, etc.) It seems a pretty simple task to delegate to an intern.

Plus, I have a blog and reach a certain type of audience with taste in books similar to mine. If I mention a book on my blog I sell at least a couple copies of it (which I know because of our Amazon affiliation. For the record, I receive no information about buyers via our website besides the books they purchase.) It’s not a ton, but I’m one blogger in a sea of a million other blogs.

Obviously, there are bigger concerns right now in the book world. But, as publishers are thinking about the bottom line, efficient use of advertising and marketing budgets has got to include “spreadable media.”

Posted by Joanne on Dec. 5, 2008 Tagged: , , ,

  • BethanyTri
    Amazon suggestions are useless in my opinion, if I bought a hard back why on earth would I want the same book in paperback? Surely publishing houses have caught on that read groups, like Oprah and the Richard and Judy show did, got people reading a range of books from authors they had never heard of before. Surely something similar can be done from their own sites to build up reviews before books are released?
  • This has continued to sit in the back of my mind since reading it - would the world of books benefit from a third party website like Last.fm? Something that combines social networking with user-generated content about book subject, style, era, etc. and uses that database of information to make better-informed recommendations? In the wake of this mess, I have to admit I trust my peers for recommendations far more than any publisher's website.
  • I agree - it's surprisingly hard to find ideas about what to read, if you're not interested in just the new big thing, considering how much information there is around. On Amazon the only thing I ever find helpful is reader's lists - the Amazon recommendations are usually completely bizarre. Librarything and Goodreads seem to incorporate some kind of recommendation system but they aren't quite Last.fm yet.
  • As someone who works for a large publishing company -- and will be publishing a novel with a different one -- I completely share your exasperation, because all of what you say makes sense, at least in theory. In my experience, the problem is rooted in the (frustrating) need to build new systems (e.g., better web sites) on top of old ones -- inventory control, manufacturing data, marketing databases, etc -- that are often very archaic and unwieldy but nevertheless function in a way that would make it impossible to simply toss them overboard and create something more elegant from scratch. It's almost like we need a year or two to stop publishing books and have the luxury of building new sites with all of the functionality you describe, and then take it from there. Except that can't happen because we need the revenue from our current operations, and then too it's always hard to find the discretionary money for web-site redesign and I'm sure you get some sense of how complicated/political the picture can get...
  • Hi! Thank you so much for your eye-opening comment! So much of social media and "branding" is snake oil, still it's hard not to marvel as publishing is one of the last industries to implement basic ideas. I used to work at one of the failing newspapers and our interoffice systems were archaic and constantly in need of technical support. I can't help but blame some of their money woes on years of technical inefficiency. Maybe one day it will be a lesson in why it is crucial to stay on top of trends in the media/tech landscape just in order to survive.

    (By the way: your upcoming novel sounds AMAZING!)



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