With the brand new mybook.de, German readers get books recommended for them from a select panel of editors, bloggers, booksellers and other qualified booklovers.
How do you capture online the essence of a good book shop, with its friendly staff always ready to recommend just the right book that you didn’t even know was there, just waiting for you to dig into?
German book publisher Ullstein has the digital answer with mybook.de, a new unique book recommendation service and online store that is launching at the Frankfurt Book Fair today.
Says Antonia Besse, managing director for mybook.de: “During my time as marketing direktor at Ullstein, a colleague and I thought that what we personally miss is a website without a lot of advertising, just a good-looking page with good book recommendations – and no Amazon-like ‘people who bought this also bought that…’ feeling.”
And so mybook.de was born: Besse was given the go-ahead to turn the idea into reality. What followed was a lot of testing, trying different ways of doing things, failing sometimes but always asking the customers directly what they liked and what they didn’t like, says Besse.
Ultimately, what they came up with is a service (for now targeted to women 20-50, well-educated with middle income and more rural than urban), where readers join up and then fill out a questionnaire where, based on their answers, they get recommendations from a panel of specially chosen “experts” – a select but very mixed group of booksellers, bloggers, literature students, editors and others; to put it simply qualified booklovers of various sorts. Once a reader has gotten her very personal recommendation, she can simply click to purchase the book, which is then sent to her overnight with special packaging and a mybook bookmark.
“We strongly believe that good book recommendations can’t be the result of a computer algorithm - algorithms deliver what others liked, not what you like,” says Besse. “Recommendations should be on point, sometimes surprising and always inspiring.”
So far, they’ve tested out the questionnaire with over 10,000 people – in a customer survey more than 60 percent used their recommendations either to buy the book or borrowed a copy. And Besse herself fills out the questionnaire twice a week. “I’m kind of a multiple-personality now,” she says, smiling. “But my personal recommendation of the week is Nele Neuhaus’ new book… I can’t wait to get the first one on Friday!”
The journey has been an exciting one for Besse, who is getting the chance to work with a startup for the first time. “I always wanted to be an entrepreneur – and never thought that the book business might have an opportunity for me,” she says. “But look what can happen with one good idea and a lot of support. Today, we are actually launching the company, it’s incredible that we made it this far!"