Around the Word: Book Discovery

Book Discovery. How do readers decide what book to read next? This process, known as "book discovery," is the latest buzz phrase in the online book marketing world. Every day there seems to be a new article or blog post debating the merits of various websites hoping to woo visitors with their book recommendations or browsing tools. This trend is growing so quickly that Publishing Perspectives is already asking if the book discoverability bubble is ready to pop. Trying to make sense of it all? A recent article on Forbes clearly lays out the online book market, customer habits, and book discovery options.

Decisions, Decisions. With so many websites trying to find the sweet spot of book discovery, there are lots of options to explore. Most people are familiar with Amazon's recommendations. But if you're looking for a more tailored experience, many book discovery websites are trying to more carefully cater to customer preferences. Bookish, launched earlier this year, is "an exercise in big data" as CEO Ardy Khazaei explains. The site will use everything from genres and authors to editorial themes and reviews to make its recommendations. Then there's Goodreads, probably the most well known and established book discovery tool, which crowdsources peer recommendations and reviews to make its selections.  Looking for something a little more exclusive? Riffle is a new invite-only book discovery site that's been compared to Pinterest. It's powered through a Facebook app that allows users to share books with friends, create lists, and see industry experts' curated pages. Still hungry for more book discovery options? Check out The Nudge List, Amazon's Shelfari, or Rabble, a Rotten Tomatoes–like website with expert reviews that is set to launch in April.

Word of Mouth. Even with all these options, the real-world experience of getting book recommendations from friends still reigns supreme. A recent Goodreads survey found that "trusted friend" remains the top reason respondents decided to read a book, followed by "everyone talking about it" and "book club." Another study, conducted by Codex Group, underscores just how far online book discovery has to go: only 7 percent of frequent online book buyers said they actually "discovered" the last book they purchased on the internet. Why can't book discovery websites seem to break through? The New Republic's Hillary Kelly has a thoughtful take: "Data has no imagination. When it comes to book recommendations, attempts to sort or streamline or mathematize them necessarily dehumanizes the process. The very nature of the endeavor, much like digesting Ulysses, requires an infinitely more complex machine: the human brain."

Babble Bubble Trouble

One of our favorite word-nerd articles of the year was the recent New York Magazine cover story about what was cutely referred to as the “babble bubble”—the explosion of big-think, TED-like conferences and the mass speechifying they have spawned. What was most interesting to us was the big-think questions the piece spawned: Is this bubble likely to pop relatively soon, as writer Benjamin Wallace suggests, a fad to soon fade away? Or are these fabulous confabs looking like an enduring fixture?

To get some expert perspective, we asked some of our speechwriting pros about the implications for our industry, and unsurprisingly, their opinions led in many different directions.

James Buchanan, a business journalist, writer, and editor, is in favor of anything that encourages intellectual rigor and affords us the time to contemplate new ideas. “In the modern digital world, communication and data/information sharing happens so fast that we barely have time to think about the implications of what we hear. TED and others provide a moment of time and clarity where we can hear what others think, they can explain their insights and the implications of those insights, and we can develop our own opinions. As a writer, this can only be of help. Ideas spark books, which spark ideas, which spark books, and on and on.”

On the other hand, Michael Gural-Maiello, an accomplished business writer who writes regularly for Forbes, comes in on the other side of the fence. “The undoing of these people is their unapologetic elitism; look at the pathetic complaints about all of the ‘betas’ being let into the room. I think the saddest observation [in the article] was that the TED Talk has replaced the book as the ultimate ambition for somebody who wants to express themselves. That's certainly evidence that we've lost site of the breadth and scope of human experience. Or maybe it's just easier to talk for 18 minutes than it is to write 300 coherent pages.”

In the middle we have Assaf Kedem, an award-winning speechwriter and communications strategist, who takes a historical view of these conferences. “Confabs have been around for longer than one may realize. Their modern-day version, in some respects, is a reincarnation of the historical town meetings that date back to previous centuries. Today’s ‘fabulous confab’ is more exclusive, glamorous, and intellectually specialized. But whatever form it takes, the essential confab is here to stay so long as there is a marketplace of ideas to be exchanged.”

As the Millions noted yesterday, it’s suddenly fashionable to hate on TED. But hating is still discussing, and as long as we’re doing that, we don’t think the reign of the “babble bubble” is likely to wind down anytime soon.