[pwalker8]

As many have figured out, discoverability is one of my pet hobby horse/soap boxes. This morning, I noticed that the kindle app has a discover tab. It's likely that it's been there a while and I just never noticed it.

First, I rarely use either the Kindle app or the iBook app as my primary reading app. Rather, I use the combination of Calibre Companion and Marvin. This is mostly because I find both the Kindle app and the iBook app slow to get to the point when I can read without interruption. Both are busy phoning home and downloading whatever stuff they are busy downloading before they will respond to anything that I might want to do. But I have been known to use the Kindle app when a new book is released and I haven't had time to download it on my mac, load it into Calibre, then download it to my iPad, so it does get occasional usage.

Apple and Amazon have very different approaches to discoverability. Apple uses the curated approach. They do this with music and movies was well. They also have top paid/free lists by sales for various categories. So you get the both what books are popular, as well as what books the various curators consider of special interest.

Amazon, on the other hand, uses some sort of combination of what other people interested in a specific book buy, as well as books they are being paid to push. Oddly enough, every single book recommended to me by the Kindle app is in Kindle Unlimited or Prime(yea, that was sarcasm).

It's difficult to give a fair comparison between the two. First, I've only bought a handful of books from Apple, so they have very little data of what I like and don't like. Second, Apple is in the process of re-designing their books app and ebook store, so I'm going off their beta software which probably isn't going to go live for another couple of months.

However, I suspect that it's going to go in the same direction of their Music store without the subscription service (or at least I have not heard any rumors that Apple will open a subscription service for ebooks), so my comments will be based on those assumptions.

For me, Kindle recommendations are pretty worthless due to the payola issue. It's really too bad because I use to find a number of authors that way. I still occasionally run across a recommendation in the emails that Amazon sends on a daily basis (yes, I actually do scan those things to see if there are any that look interesting). IMPO, this is a situation where they let the marketing guys kill the golden goose as they were trying to monetize all aspects of the Amazon infrastructure. Of course, those who are deeply embedded into the KU system probably see this as a feature rather than a bug.

The big issue with Apple is if the curator shares similar taste with you. If so, great, if not, well not so great. I've run across this Apple music. I've had some major problems with the recommendation engine that Apple music uses and once it's gone off the deep end, it's pretty close to impossible to get it fixed.

My personal take is that Apple would be better served by hiring various people in the different categories and allow the customers to subscribe to which curators they want to use. Of course, they may use the "best of" curated list (i.e. best of the space opera, best of the urban fantasy, best of the high fantasy) model, which is one that appeals to me. In their Apple Music, they have playlist such as "Best rock from 1982" which they update every so often. That works pretty well for me.

To sum up, for me, discoverability is something that they still haven't quite figured out and I would love to see them experiment with a lot of different approaches. Amazon use to have a very nice system when they would pay people a small referral fee for any books purchased via a link from their site. This allowed sites like authoralert.com to make money providing a service that Amazon hasn't seemed to be able to get to work. Unfortunately, Amazon has decided they don't need to do that any more. I consider that penny wise and pound foolish since it's certainly cut back on my purchases. I don't see Apple going this route either.