Stack of BooksAs you may already know, I’m on Goodreads, although more for the book-tracking part of it than the social media part. I mean, you’re welcome to friend me or whatever, but I don’t spend a lot of time writing reviews, leaving comments, or chatting with others about their account activity; I know a lot of people do, it’s just not what I like to use it for.

So I found it interesting that three of the biggest publishers — Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group and Penguin Group (USA) — have teamed up to launch a competing social-media-for-readers website, Bookish. In addition to being a place to track your reading activity, you can get recommendations (drawn from those publishers’ catalogs), buy e-books directly, and read original content like interviews and excerpts. Sounds good… but will people use it?

Any kind of social website lives and dies on its network of connected users. I have a Google+ account, but most days it’s pretty dead over there, because the whole world is still pretty much on Facebook. Will Goodreads users find Bookish so vastly superior that they’re compelled to jump ship?

It’s early days, so I don’t want to judge Bookish too harshly, but I created an account just to explore, and so far I’m not terribly impressed. I tried to add some books that I’m reading to my “read” shelf, and the search engine was kind of clunky and couldn’t always find the titles I wanted. The recommendations widget claims to have 250,000+ titles at its disposal, but didn’t find me anything fascinating (or anything I’ve already read). Plenty of titles have generic placeholder “we don’t have cover art for this title” thumbnails. Really? A website created by the books’ publishers can’t lay hands on the cover art for its own titles?! Not very impressive.

On the plus side, the site is very slick-looking, with playful fonts and a clean color scheme that’s not too girly. They have some timely content, like a Valentine’s Day book list, and featured content by authors and celebrities. Still, I think I’d rather have Amazon’s no-nonsense utilitarian layout when it’s time to actually search for something, and Bookish probably wouldn’t be my first destination for buying an e-book, either. In fact, since I’m a Kindle owner, I’d have to use the outbound link on a product page to buy the digital version anyway — so why would I take the extra time-wasting step of starting on Bookish in the first place?

So far, I’m not sure how, or if, Bookish is going to fit into my life, but I’m willing to be proven wrong. Have you started an account yet? What do you like (and dislike) about it compared to Goodreads or other social-reading sites? Tell us in the comments!

 

Stephanie Perry
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