There is no shortage of websites that aim to connect books with readers, and most of them offer some pretty familiar features. Find books, rate books, review books, talk about… books. Occasionally, though, a site comes along whose goal is to bring something new to the book discovery realm.
BookLikes, the Poland-based multi-national site whose eight month beta launch finally went public yesterday, does bring some new twists to book discovery. While still incorporating the same kinds of features that have made sites like Goodreads so popular and well-trafficked, BookLinks offers its users a greater scope by creating book blogs rather than profiles.
“We don’t think of BookLikes as a direct competitior to Goodreads,” explained BookLikes’ CEO Dawid Piaskowski in an interview with GoodEReader today. “Whatever you’re going to do on BookLikes is going to land on your profile on Goodreads soon. We’re just a different type of service. If Goodreads is like Facebook, we’re more like Tumblr.”
To illustrate that comparison, Piaskowski pointed to one popular BookLikes users’ site, HappyBooks. Similar to a blog platform that lets users create their web addresses and incorporate the platform name into the URL, BookLikes users establish actual template-driven book blog pages and write their reviews, host comments about titles, and more. What is somewhat more appealing to users and to readers is the ability to link directly through the blog to the sales pages from various retailers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and more. As a reader clicks the sales page for a book that a BookLikes blogger reviewed, a portion of that purchase goes back to the book blogger as part of the retailers’ affiliate programs.
Despite being headquartered in Poland for the present, BookLikes has already had an international following, with over 8000 users creating pages from twelve different countries. The global scope of book discovery isn’t all the makes BookLikes stand out, however, opting instead to build itself in terms of keeping up with an ever-evolving publishing landscape.
“We have a strange rule that we will release mew features every Thursday. It’s just something we believe we must do.”
Mercy Pilkington is a Senior Editor for Good e-Reader. She is also the CEO and founder of a hybrid publishing and consulting company.
