I’ve been following publishing news ever since I began publishing my romance fiction, and in recent months it’s become apparent that digital is dominating the news. This week, three stories jumped out at me:

Whichbook

Here’s a new site that matches a book to your mood. According to the site,‘Whichbook enables millions of combinations of factors and then suggests books which most closely match your needs.’

Uniquely, the site has a set of sliders you can adjust to create the perfect match, from conventional to unusual, optimistic to bleak, safe to disturbing, funny to serious, no sex to lots of sex and short to long. You can also browse interesting categories, like ‘A terrible beauty’ and ‘Comfort zone’ and ‘Pure entertainment’.

According to Whichbook, the titles are collated by ‘a changing team of 70 people who are drawn from libraries and literature organisations and come together to share training to create the entries. The ratings and comments are created by real readers who care about books.’

Interestingly, the site doesn’t focus on the biggest bestsellers but tries to introduce readers to lots of intriguing and less well-known titles. Indeed, with just a minute of clicking I was offered a list of suggestions, and two of the books in that list were new to me and looked intriguing.

Well worth a visit, at http://www.openingthebook.com/whichbook/.

LiteraryHub

This new website aims to be ‘a single, trusted, daily source for all the news, ideas and richness of contemporary literary life’.

‘There is more great literary content online than ever before, but it is scattered, easily lost. With the help of its partners—publishers big and small, journals, bookstores and non-profits—Literary Hub will be a place where readers can return each day for smart, engaged, and entertaining writing about all things books.’

So reads the Literary Hub mission statement. The list of partners for this new venture launched by independent publisher Grove Atlantic and books site Electric Literature is lengthy and impressive, bringing together small presses and giant ones, booksellers and literary reviews.

Each day the Hub will offer a new feature (an interview, for example, or an essay), and an excerpt from a forthcoming title. LitHub Daily, available as a newsletter, will highlight ten literary stories of the day.

This isn’t a website looking to sell books – in fact, it especially doesn’t want to tread on the toes of bricks-and-mortar bookstores. The business model is simple: exchange content for advertising on the site.

I’ve signed up for the newsletter already, and when I browsed the features section, I got entirely immersed in the intelligent, interesting material (Martin Solares’s ‘How to Draw a Novel’ is amazing). If you haven’t checked out Literary Hub yet, you’re missing out.http://lithub.com/

Oyster

Oyster has been dubbed ‘the Netflix of e-books’ – until recently, it specialised in offering subscription-based reading for ebooks. But now it has decided to set up its own ebook store. A brave move indeed, given that its principal competitor will be the behemoth Amazon.

An argument that supports more competition in the market is that publishers have begun to standardise ebook prices, which means ebook buyers won’t so much choose their bookstore for ebooks based on price in the future, but based on other factors, such as the ease and pleasure of the shopping experience. ‘You’ll have to compete on other things like discovery and design,’said Oyster CEO Eric Stromberg. Access to Amazon’s e-reader is problematic, however.

The bottom line appears to be that subscriptions alone aren’t enough to make a profitable business in the book publishing sphere. Penguin Random House’s CEO said at the Futurebook conference, ‘“Eat everything you can” isn’t a reader’s mindset. In music or film you might want 10,000 songs or films, but I don’t think you want 10,000 books.’According to research, the proportion of people who read more than a book a week is very small, so subscriptions are catering to a very small market.

Have you tried a reading subscription service? If so, I’d love to know how you got on with it.