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How Do You Discover New Books?

This article is more than 10 years old.

If you're like most people, the No. 1 way you discover a great new book is through word of mouth. But you probably also discover new books through social media, seeing them in bookstores, reading book reviews and even through traditional advertising.

In fact, there are more ways today to discover new books than ever before, according to a new study from Bowker, a book-focused market research firm.

This has publishers concerned. It used to be that you put a book in Barnes & Noble, paid for it to be on the front table or somewhere else advantageous, engaged in a traditional public relations and marketing campaign, did a book tour and, voila, you have yourself some book sales.

Today, the landscape is much different, fractured even. And book publishers are finding that the old ways of promoting books don't work as well as they used to. Today, there's the Amazon algorithm, which recommends books to you based on the books other people bought and liked. There's Twitter, Facebook and other social media, that are taking time away from the traditional media (book reviews, radio tours, Good Morning America) that publishers once relied on.

Publishers are getting smarter about how they focus their marketing efforts, investing in social media and other new kinds of marketing. And a new crop of start-ups are springing up to help readers discover new books -- and to help publishers help readers do so.

Oyster wants to be the Spotify for e-books, offering a new way for readers to buy books (and for publishers to sell and market them). Bookshout! wants to be your e-book library and social reading destination. Jellybooks wants you to browse book excerpts and share them with your friends.

All of these start-ups have something in common, though: They depend on you. Without people buying books, sharing books, talking about books, these start-ups don't offer much in the way of new book discovery.

A new project, however, wants to take the human element out of book recommendation. It's called Booksai (Books AI), and it's an artificial intelligence engine that reads books the way a human would and recommends books that "feel" similar to it. Right now, the platform only has about 10,000 books and many kinks to work out. But, in the future, it could be the way that bookstores (online and bricks-and-mortar) find new books for you, the way librarians make connections between books that Amazon's algorithms don't see, and the way that enterprising readers find something new and unexpected. (There's also a project called Booklamp that calls itself the "Pandora of e-books" and works differently from Booksai.)

So, how do you discover new books?