Bookish Launches New Site for Book Lovers

The Internet is such a giving thing. Another book site for us to love? Sign me up!

Launched on Tuesday, Bookish is like the love child of Goodreads and Amazon. Like Goodreads, Bookish allows you to rate books with a star system, review them, and add them to a virtual bookshelf. It expands upon that, though, with a chance to order books directly from the site (prices are discounted, but not as deeply as on Amazon). With the intent to connect readers with books and authors, Bookish also offers exclusive content and author interviews.

I set up an account yesterday to check it out, and I have to say, it’s pretty slick. When you create an account you can customize the experience by choosing the genres you’re most interested in and choose your preferred book format (dead trees, iPad, Nook, Kindle).

The most promising part of Bookish in my opinion is the chance to find books based on your tastes. Under “recommendations” you can add the titles of up to four books you love and Bookish will make recommendations based on those. And there’s a spot to choose “not for me” when Bookish recommends something you’re not interested in. This portion of Bookish is still in beta, but I have high hopes that the system will begin to work like Netflix, offering more and more accurate results as members interact with the site. (I have a message in to Bookish to find out if this will be the case; as yet I’ve not heard back from them.) Individual book pages feature recommendations for similar books, reviews, and links to more books by the author.

Overall, the site is pretty bereft of book reviews at the moment, but that just means they’re not importing the same old reviews from other sites – they’re counting on their members to provide honest feedback to help the book community choose their next read. In a cool twist, members can also add favorite quotes from books – great for someone who doesn’t want to take the time to write a review but still wants to participate.

A-list authors and bestsellers are featured prominently as the site launches. You can read an excerpt of Harlan Coben’s latest psychological thriller Six Years or read an exclusive essay by Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert. Or, if those are too mundane, you can read what the editors of The Onion think of Fifty Shades of Grey and other popular books in their humorous reviews. Hopefully Bookish will look beyond the fact that their backers are big publishing companies (Hachette Book Group, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster) and expand to include content from or interviews with indie and alternative publishers as well.

Interested in exploring? Of course you’ll want to start by checking out the new Geek Mom book. And while you’re there you can use the “I love this author!” button to give a shout out to our own GeekMom authors.

• Natania Barron
• Kathy Ceceri
• Corrina Lawson
• Laura Grace Weldon
• Jenny Williams
• Melissa Wiley
• Marziah Karch
• Kris Bordessa