Random House Discusses Facebook Book Discovery Platform – BookScout

BookScout is a Random House Book discovery platform and social media community that launched in January. It functions as a Facebook application that is easy to access to share ebooks you are reading with your friends and discover new books with the new Summer Reads Recommendations program. Last week, Random House pushed a new update that allowed users to access an optimized mobile version of BookScout. Today, we talked to Amanda Close, the SVP of Digital Marketplace Development at Random House, to learn more about the evolution of the service and get a sense of the future. Amanda talked about the origins of BookScout, saying, “BookScout for us has been a super interesting RND project that allowed us to do a few things, figure out ways to engage more closely on the platform around books. We developed BookScout mainly to look at the books your friends were sharing and share common libraries. We also wanted to get more Facebook experience under our belts and understand the platform a bit better.” She added that, “We started the development of BookScout six months before our public release. We did a ton of research before we even started, specifically for the Facebook platform. Internally we wanted to appeal to book clubs, consistent readers, and facilitate conversation. We did a few online surveys, and some of the feedback we got centered around, how do you decide on the next book you want to read. Hence, the advent of BookScout.” The one thing Random House did very well with the BookScout project was to be publisher agnostic. Many publishing companies tend to put an emphasis on their own titles and exclude everything else. Random House buckled the trend by including a wide array of Books from ALL major publishers. “We think books are in competition with other forms of media and us doing it this way makes sense, because we want the consumer experience to be whole and users will not sign up for only our titles. It was important to make sure we made a tool that covered all the books in the industry and we were able to facilitate that on a platform everyone knows really well, Facebook. It never even came intro our minds from the initial development of BookScout that we would exclusively focus on our own titles,” explained Amanda. Currently, the core BookScout team is very small and does not really have a dedicated team, in the conventional sense. Most of the people working on it have responsibilities in other departments, and there are no full time people exclusively working on the development of BookScout. It seems to be a cool pet project that people can contribute codes and designs to, while brainstorming new ideas in between their average workday. People tend to stop by within Random House and contribute interesting titles they want people to share under the Summer Reads BookScout campaign. In the future, the company is working on a number of new enhancements and features that should appeal to the social aspect of reading. It remains to be seen if BookScout will ultimately have a dedicated full-time team of engineers and designers who work on the platform full time. Really, it comes down to the popularity of social book discovery and if customers embrace it. Random House Discusses Facebook Book Discovery Platform – BookScout is a post from: E-Reader News

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