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"Readers may be doing more of their book shopping online, but some recent studies suggest they still discover more books they want to read in bricks-and-mortar bookstores rather than on websites. Now, one new website hopes to improve book discovery online and it has the backing of some of the biggest players in the publishing industry.\nBookish, which launched Tuesday, mixes cutting-edge technology with a team of seasoned editors to help readers discover new print and digital book titles that they might want to read next. The website features exclusive book excerpts, interviews with authors and editor's picks across 18 different categories  \u2014 similar to many literary publications \u2014 but it also uses machine learning and big data to pull up relevant recommendations for hundreds of thousands of books.\n\"Our approach is that we want to empower many paths to discovery,\" Bookish CEO Ardy Khazaei told Mashable. \"By doing this, you help expand the market. If you remove the discovery friction, by default more books are going to be bought.\" With that in mind, Bookish has built-in ecommerce links that let users buy books from a range of websites, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and Apple's iTunes store, among others.\nBookish certainly isn't the first website to take a stab at improving book discovery, but it is particularly notable given the long list of companies who have partnered with it. Three of the \"big six\" publishers \u2014 Hachette, Penguin and Simon &amp; Schuster \u2014 are directly funding the website, and more than a dozen other publishers, including Random House and Harper Collins, have agreed to provide Bookish with exclusive content. Bookish has also partnered with USA Today to share original editorial content with the newspaper.\nThe website was once scheduled to launch in 2011, but was delayed by nearly two years, a period during which three different CEOs took the helm. Khazaei, who took over as CEO in October, chalks up the delays to \"technology challenges,\" which he admits frustrated the publishers backing the project. \"You can imagine they invested and it was delayed and they had concerns,\" he said.  \nUntil now, popular retail websites like Amazon have generally made recommendations about what users might want to buy next based on what they or their friends have purchased in the past. But the team at Bookish felt this wasn't the best tactic for dealing with book recommendations. \"It's not based on an understanding of the book itself,\" Khazaei said. To that end, he says Bookish developed technology to analyze data about the book and reader reviews to surface particular themes and motifs \u2014 or what Khazaei refers to as the book's \"fingerprint\" \u2014 in order to automatically generate the best recommendations. \n\nOn top of all that, editors have the option to offer their own feedback on selections. There are currently 22 people on the Bookish team, including seven people in editorial, several of whom previously worked as editors at AOL. \nThe downside to the Bookish recommendation engine is that it requires a certain amount of data from each book and reader reviews in order to make suggestions. For that reason, even though there are about 1.2 million books featured on Bookish, only about 250,000 of these have recommendations attached at the moment. Khazaei says this number will certainly increase over time, but it may prove difficult to offer recommendations for more obscure books that have been read and reviewed less.\nGoing forward, the goal is to continue improving site navigation and the recommendation engine, as well as to add more tools that allow the user to have a personalized experience, including the option to create more bookshelves (similar to Goodreads). There are no immediate plans to build out mobile apps, though Khazaei says the team will work on optimizing the website for mobile.\nImage via iStockphoto, PinkBadger"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/02/05/bookish/>