From the WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_e...MDAwNjEwNDYyWj
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Zola Books Inc., a fledgling e-books retailer, is buying Bookish, a book site launched last February by CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster, Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group, and Penguin Group (USA), now part of Penguin Random House. The purchase price wasn't disclosed.
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The site so far is losing money on modest revenue, which one person involved in the venture estimated to be under $5 million on annualized basis. "It's fair to say we aren't acquiring it for the revenue," said Joe Regal, Zola's chief executive. "We're a technology company and they created a valuable piece of technology. To make it fly would be great for our company."
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Zola itself is a modestly funded startup so the sale price was probably low, as expected of a half-baked, poorly defined effort.
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The site's recommendation engine is built around specific book attributes as opposed to consumer purchases. For example, a reader who liked Gillian Flynn's best-selling thriller "Gone Girl" is offered four recommendations, including the late Elmore Leonard's novel "Rum Punch." But the site may need some further tinkering: one of the four recommendations for readers who liked "Gone Girl" is Michael Paterniti's "The Telling Room," a work of nonfiction.
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It's going to need a lot of further work.
If they can get the recommendation engine working properly (like the music recommendation engines at Pandora. LAST.FM, etc) they can probably make more money licensing its services to the generic epub ebookstores than selling ebooks.