By Bruce Watson

Filed under: Books, How to Save Money, Deals, Saving

There’s nothing like a good bookstore. Curling up in the stacks, a pile of potential purchases surrounding you, flipping through a few pages here, a few pages there, following your interests wherever they may go. How relaxing, how enjoyable, how…1997.

Last year, e-book sales outpaced hardcovers for the first time — a development that, not surprisingly, has paralleled the decline of brick-and-mortar booksellers. But, while the e-book revolution (and, to a greater extent, the Amazon revolution) has increased the convenience and cut the costs of book buying, it has also erased some of the pleasures that once accompanied bookstore shopping. Gone are the surprises — the sudden discovery of a great new author or the wondrous delight of a deeply discounted book that you’ve always wanted.

Recreating the Bookstore…Online

A few companies have tried to imitate the joy of bookstore discovery. The goal — helping readers to find new authors, as well as discount books — is ultimately helpful to publishers as well as readers. After all, wondrous discoveries lead to wondrous sales. Even if those books are discounted, there still is a lot of money to be made, especially on e-books, which are much cheaper to produce and distribute than traditional “dead tree” hard copies of books.

For Kindle users — including me — Amazon’s deals have long been the standard for the e-bookstore experience. Between their monthly specials, which spotlight 100 deeply discounted books, and their daily deals, which focus on four specials every day, a Kindle user can expect a consistent trickle of book bargains.

Other content companies, like Apple and Barnes and Noble offer similar services.

But for a real book junkie — again, like me — an online bookseller that only spotlights a couple hundred discounted books per month isn’t nearly enough. Put in terms of the traditional bookstore experience, this would be roughly comparable to going to the “cheap deals” section of a bookstore, only to find that it consists of one shelf that is sparsely filled with bad mystery novels and self-help books.

Another Model

Josh Schanker, a Boston-based digital entrepreneur, thinks that he might have the solution. Like the DailyDeal, his company, BookBub, sends out a free daily e-mail that highlights deeply discounted books. However, unlike Amazon’s service, BookBub offers bargains for users across all major reader platforms, including the iPad, the Kindle, the Sony reader and the Nook. More importantly, though, it allows users to select books across 17 different genres — far more than the four offerings that come in each Daily Deal e-mail.

Finding books to promote is easy: publishers and independent writers pay BookBub to spotlight their publications. In fact, the difficult part is sorting through the requests: Schanker estimates that BookBub receives at least 50 submissions per day. “We …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance