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While bookstores are reporting increased sales this month, I foresee a time when “Staff Picks” at the local booke shoppe will soon be replaced by recommendation engines that tell you what ebook to pick up next.

Services like Amazon’s own recommendation engine and smaller guys like Booklamp all promise to let you know what tome to crack after you finish the Stephen King epic but GoodReads adds a bit of value-add to the burgeoning self-publishing movement.

The service lets authors create their own author pages and fans can follow and interact with writers in the comments and on private author blogs. You can also rate fifteen books to begin getting recommendations for future reading. Authors can run private blogs, send out giveaways, and publicize events using the service.

The service has recommended 6 million books to 6.5 million users and there are currently 240 million books in the database. They are adding 14 million books a month. The team has doubled this year from 10 to 20 people (and they’re hiring).

“We’re profitable,” wrote Otis Chandler in an email. “We think we have the best book recommendations on the internet right now (yes, better than Amazon) and we launched our recommendations in September after having acquired a company (Discovereads) in March to power them – and the results have been phenomenal.”

In the end services like GoodReads and good old word of mouth will power the publishing industry. If I can market my own books – for free or for a price – and sell them to eager customers, I’m much more likely to self publish and, although this will be decreasingly likely, work with a publisher. The old model of publishing was the movement of widgets, by truck, from warehouse to store to consumer. The new model is one-to-one and sites like GoodReads are powering this revolution.

 

   

 

via techcrunch.com

I use Google+, but I'm not sure how useful these will be to me. At any rate, Mashable has the latest...

Google is on fire today: besides introducing the new activities recommendation engine Schemer, and the news aggregator Currents, the company also improved Google+ with several nifty features, including face detection.

The new feature is called Find my Face, and it helps tag photos of people in pictures, provided they’ve activated the feature.

Google has obviously learned a lesson from Facebook, which suffered some backlash – even an EU probe – over turning its face recognition feature on by default. In Google+, you can accept or reject someone tagging you or turn the feature on and off and, most importantly, the feature is opt-in.

Find my Face will be rolling out to users over the next couple of days.

Gmail has also been upgraded with a couple of social networking features, making it easier to add people to your Google+ Circles from Gmail and share stuff on Google+ without leaving your inbox.

 

Furthermore, you can now also filter messages in Gmail according to your Circles; for example, you can see only the messages from your family, work colleagues or any other group of people you’ve defined as a Circle.

Google will be rolling out these new features to users’ Gmail and Gmail Contacts over the next couple of days

I've found Google Alerts to be very useful and this new feature looks especially appealing to me.

Google Alerts has a new feature that lets you set alerts specifically for books.  So if you are into a specific author, books on subjects that you follow, or books that have a unique combination of subjects, this service will be a big help.

You head over to Google Alerts:

Then you enter your keywords on the bar at the top.  The change comes to the Type pull down where you can now select Books as one of the types.  Then set up the frequency of the alerts, the volume and the email address.  You will get to preview your alerts if you like.  I find this very helpful because I can make quick changes that really tailor the alert to the results I am looking for. 

Create the Alert and you will start to receive them.  I use general alerts to find news published about our library, about subject areas, and now I look forward to building alerts for books.

Amazon’s proposal would reportedly offer limited book rentals to Amazon Prime customers. (BLOOMBERG) Would you pay to have limited, monthly access to a library of books for your e-reader? According to report from the Wall Street Journal, Amazon is hoping you would.

The online retailer is reportedly thinking about making a subscription library service available to Amazon Prime members, adding book rentals to the $79 per month [sic] service that now offers online video and an unlimited deal on two-day shipping. The rental subscription, described in the report as a Netflix-like service for books, would offer older titles, and the company would limit the amount of books users could read for free every month.

According to Journal sources “familiar with the matter,” Amazon is trying to sell the idea to publishers, who may be wary about the effect that that kind of service would have on the value of books and their partnerships with bookstores.

If you needed any more proof that the age of dead-tree books is over take a look at these alarming style changes at Ikea: the furniture manufacturer’s iconic BILLY bookcase – the bookcase that everyone put together when they got their first apartment and, inevitably, pounded the nails wrong into – is becoming deeper and more of a curio cabinet. Why? Because Ikea is noticing that customers no longer buy them for books.

This isn’t quite the canary in the coal mine – think of it as a slight tickle in the mine foreman’s throat – but all signs are pointing to the end of the physical book. There are plenty of analogs to this situation. When’s the last time you saw a casette tape rack sold outside of Odd Lots? What about the formal “stereo cabinet” with plenty of room for records? What about Virgin Megastores?

The Economist writes:

Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.

Will bookstores disappear? I think so. With the rise of popular fiction appearing on ereaders, I think the paperback will be the first to go and all that will be left is the “curio” hardback. Then I look forward to a half decade of the publishing industry scrambling to stem piracy and flail wildly at consumers, then hardware manufacturers, then finally settle into the long-fall doldrums the music industry is now facing.

In June we launched the +1 button for websites, making it easier to recommend content across the web. In July, the +1 button crossed 2 billion daily views, and we also made it a lot faster. Today the +1 button appears on more than a million sites, with over 4 billion daily views, and we're extremely excited about this momentum.

It's just the beginning, however, and today we're launching two more features that make +1 buttons more useful for users and publishers alike.

Sharing with your circles on Google+
Clicking the +1 button is a great way to highlight content for others when they search on Google. But sometimes you want to start a conversation right away—at least with certain groups of friends. So beginning today, we're making it easy for Google+ users to share webpages with their circles, directly from the +1 button. Just +1 a page as usual and look for the new "Share on Google+" option. From there you can comment, choose a circle and share.

 

The new +1 button on Rotten Tomatoes

+Snippets
When you share content from the +1 button, you’ll notice that we automatically include a link, an image and a description in the sharebox. We call these "+snippets," and they're a great way to jumpstart conversations with the people you care about.

Of course: publishers can benefit from +snippets as well. With just a few changes to their webpages, publishers can actually customize their +snippets and encourage more sharing of their content on Google+. More details are available on the Google Webmaster blog.

We're rolling out sharing and +snippets globally over the next week, but if you’d like to try the new +1 button now, you can join our Google+ Platform Preview. Once you're part of the Preview, just visit a site with the +1 button (like Rotten Tomatoes) and +1 the page. Thanks for all of your feedback so far, and stay tuned for more features in the weeks and months ahead!

via googleblog.blogspot.com

Whether you’re organizing a trip overseas or a picnic at a local park, knowing the weather forecast is a crucial part of the planning process. Today, we’re adding a weather layer on Google Maps that displays current temps and conditions around the globe, and will hopefully make travel and activity planning easier.

To add the weather layer, hover over the widget in the upper right corner of Google Maps and select the weather layer from the list of options. When zoomed out, you’ll see a map with current weather conditions from weather.com for various locations, with icons to denote sun, clouds, rain and so on. You can also see cloud coverage, thanks to our partners at the U.S. Naval Research Lab. And, if you look closely, you can also tell if it’s day or night around the world by sun and moon icons.

Enabling the weather layer also gives you an instant weather report for friends and family living around the world.

 

Weather near London, UK

Clicking on the weather icon for a particular city will open an info window with detailed data like current humidity and wind conditions, as well as a forecast for the next four days

via googleblog.blogspot.com

From MakeUseOf:

Despite the obvious attraction to real paper-based books, the digital world has begun to create some really special adaptations of great stories. These somehow blur the line between books, movies and games, by providing a story in page-by-page format, interactivity and audiovisual segments. They’re also usually highly customisable, enabling parents to choose how much glitz to add to an already-worthwhile story. Take a quick look at two prime examples of the new interactive picture book market.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore – MoonBot Studios, William Joyce & Brandon Oldenburg

The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore is a story which started as a short film and then was adapted to become an interactive book for the iPad. Both the film ($2) and the iPad application ($5) version of the story are available to purchase, which is good news for people without an iPad.

Moonbot Studios have created something very special with their iPad application. You can make the pictures animated, add music and sound effects, or remove everything and read it as just a straight book.

On every page there’s something interactive: wind, books, piano keyboard. It’s all there. Readers can get quite engrossed in the story as they’re actually helping the story to be told.