A website that combines social networking with online shopping
has gone live. BookRabbit.com launched in May with a product
offering of 4.2 million book titles, promoting lower-than-Amazon
prices on “the top 100,000 titles”. It also enables
customers to upload pictures of their bookcases so that other
visitors to the site can view collections of those who have the
same titles and interests as them. “You are more likely to
buy a book based on the recommendation from another book lover or
by seeing it on a friend’s bookcase,” said managing
director Kieron Smith, “than you are because a faceless
merchant puts it on a stand in their shop or a computer-generated
algorithm tells you to.”
In addition, BookRabbit has partnered with ICUE, a provider of
mobile services, to allow customers to download a free chapter
from a book onto their mobile phones. After downloading the
chapter, customers will be able to link directly to BookRabbit to
buy the book. BookRabbit also features the opportunity for
readers to create categories for books, classifying their
collection using an approach that feels more personal to them.
Smith compares BookRabbit to MySpace: “Artists and music
lovers can promote their music and interests online without being
beholden to the music label. In the same way BookRabbit allows
people to share, recommend and buy books that are not necessarily
the most heavily promoted by the traditional book
industry.”
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