Bookish sold to Zola books

[fjtorres]

From the WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_e...MDAwNjEwNDYyWj

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.

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."

Zola itself is a modestly funded startup so the sale price was probably low, as expected of a half-baked, poorly defined effort.

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.

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.

[pwalker8]

Yep, it's going to need a lot of work. I tried it out with a few books, trying to group similar type books so I didn't freak it out too much. I wasn't exactly impressed with the suggestions.

[bgalbrecht]

I couldn't get it to make a recommendation with Captain Vorpatril's Alliance and Redshirts (runner-up and Hugo Award winner last year), and when I looked at Catch-22, it claimed that it was available as an ebook for $1, but it wasn't available anywhere for that price. I'm not impressed.

[pwalker8]

The first company that can give reliable recommendations ought to make some serious money. Heck, I'm still looking for someone who can reliably tell me when favored authors have new books available as ebooks. I've pretty much given up on trying to browse the Amazon Kindle store for new releases.

[tubemonkey]

I hate recommendations of all kinds. More times than not, they get it wrong.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

I hate recommendations of all kinds. More times than not, they get it wrong.

Amazon's reading recommendations are scarily good. I often end up buying books they recommend to me.