The winning startup will be announced at Book Expo America on May 31 and will receive $10,000 and the chance to pitch its product to William Morris Endeavor co-CEO Ari Emanuel.

Here are the finalists:

• BookCity: A way to find books set in your travel destination [photo illustrating this post]
• Captiv: Makes book recommendations based on your Twitter activity
• Coverlist: A solution that focuses on browsing book jackets
• Evoke:  A way to discover young adult literature through characters and browse books by emotion: “Readers may determine if they wish to be inspired, challenged, amused, or informed during their next read based on content generated by an audience-in-common” [photo on right]
• KooBrowser: Makes book recommendations based on your web browsing habits [photo on left]
• LibraryAtlas: A book discovery solution based on geolocation

I attended the demos on Sunday. A few thoughts:

• It’s hard to come up with a book discovery idea that is not similar to Goodreads in some way, though the finalists above did a good job. Many of the teams built ideas on Goodreads data or pulled other information from it.
• Book-recommendation algorithms were big (and, you’ll notice, didn’t make the cut above). A lot of teams described their idea as “Pandora for books” or “Netflix for books,” but they just meant that the software serves content recommendations, not that it actually streams content.
• Of the above, I thought that KooBrowser seemed most useful and like something I’d actually use. The idea is that, if you’re reading an article online, you could pull up a list of book recommendations based on the content of that article. The success of KooBrowser depends on how good the recommendations are, of course. But this idea seems to fit well into users’ actual everyday activity without being annoying. (I’m still not sold on the idea of receiving book recommendations pushed to my phone when I’m out and about.)

I got a demo of Bookish at the company’s trendy, book-filled offices in Manhattan’s Flatiron District last week, and had a chance to use the site further on Monday when it was prematurely available online for several hours as it was being tested. Overall, I think the long-delayed Bookish is off to a promising start.

Bookish has the opportunity to shape book discovery and offers publishers a chance to directly engage with readers. It also allows them to tiptoe into direct sales. I’m less intrigued by the original editorial content: I’m not sure it differentiates itself enough from other book-related content on the web to draw users to the site for the first time. Once those users make their way to the site, though, they’ll find a clean, easy-to-use design, and an algorithm that may well find them their next book — even though it’s limited to less than a quarter of the books on the site for now. Here’s my overview of the site.

 The basics: Books and authors

While only three of the big-six publishers are financially backing the site, the other three — Random House, HarperCollins and Macmillan — are making their books available through it, along with 10 other publishers including Scholastic and Houghton Mifflin. In total, that’s 1.2 million unique titles spanning 18 genres (fiction and literature, children’s, cookbooks, and so on), and 400,000 authors have profile pages. The book pages include basic information, a preview of the first chapter, related news and videos, and a roundup of any “must-read” lists that the book has appeared on (for more on those lists, see below). Each book page also includes purchase links (more on that below, too).

Algorithm-generated book recommendations

Online book discovery is a huge problem for publishers, and Bookish tackles it with a recommendation algorithm that lets users input up to four titles to find what to read next. “We’re very much a technology company,” Karen Sun, an MIT grad (and book blogger) who is heading the company’s recommendation engine, told me. “This is probably the largest venture in the book space, in terms of data.” Sun explained that while Amazon and Goodreads primarily deliver book recommendations based on “collaborative filtering” — namely, a user’s purchasing or rating and reviewing history as well as those of other users — Bookish doesn’t have that user or purchase data yet. Instead, it relies on “deep, introspective” data: “Recommendations are based on the books and understanding of the books.” The recommendation looks at features like the authors, editors and illustrators who contributed to a book, the awards a book has won, and genre and publication date, then layers on a machine-learning component that parses user and professional reviews to try to distill themes, concepts and sentiments. Insights from the editorial team are included, too.

A user who liked The Help, for instance, receives recommendations for Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford — another women’s fiction title that features race relations — and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book that, like The Help, includes an aspiring female author. Type in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and the engine pulled up four similar “big ideas” books, but also two Spanish-language titles that were out of place even if the subject matter was similar (and you’ll see a Spanish-language edition of The Room in the recommendations for The Help above).

For now, Bookish’s recommendation engine works with only about 250,000 of the 1.2 million books on the site. Sun says the engine will improve over time, and will eventually integrate reader reviews and user actions — other books users have looked at and rated on the site.

E-commerce: Essential, but…

Each book on the site can be purchased in print or digital formats directly through Bookish or from another retailer — there are affiliate links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, IndieBound, Apple and Kobo.

Distributor Baker & Taylor is handling all of Bookish’s direct sales. For now, ebooks purchased through Bookish are only available in EPUB and PDF formats, for reading on iPad, Android, Nook and desktop — no Kindle.

Bookish seems to want to stress that it’s not cutting into other retailers’ sales, even though a serious direct-sales outlet is something that book publishers desperately need.

“We want to be able to say you can buy [a book] here and it’s reasonably priced. We’re not trying to steal sales away from other places,” CEO Khazaei told me. Publishers probably don’t care about taking sales from Amazon, but they may not want to sour relationships with retailers like Barnes & Noble and the independent bookstores represented by IndieBound.

Bookish’s print and ebook prices appeared to match those offered by Amazon, though I wasn’t able to test many titles. Khazaei told me that “I don’t know how the pricing decisions are made, really,” Khazaei said. “I assume [Baker & Taylor] is tracking [prices on other sites] but we just leave it in their hands.” While the site seems like an obvious place for publishers to run special sales on both print and digital books, that doesn’t seem to be a priority for now. Update: Khazaei stressed to me that his lack of involvement with pricing is required by the Department of Justice in order to be compliant with antitrust regulations. (The DOJ sued Hachette, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, along with Macmillan and HarperCollins, last year for allegedly colluding to set ebook prices; Hachette, Penguin and S&S all settled.)

Original editorial content along with the algorithm

Bookish has seven full-time editors who each manage different genres and update those sections daily with original book coverage. The site is also soliciting pieces from well-known authors and other public figures. In one ongoing feature, for instance, editors from The Onion review books. Other editorial features at launch include a column by Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert and an interview between bestselling thriller authors Michael Connelly and Michael Kortya. In addition to that content, the site’s editors are curating columns and lists of books like “The Biggest BFF Breakups in YA Books” and “Big Ideas.”

Advertising, revenue and partnerships

Bookish is collaborating with USA Today’s books website. Its original editorial content will be syndicated on USA Today’s website, and the technology that Bookish uses to let readers view the first chapter of a book and to offer book recommendations will also be included on USA Today’s site. In exchange, Bookish will feature USA Today’s book bestseller lists on bookish.com.

In addition to book sales, Bookish will get revenue from advertising. For now the site’s ad slots are taken up with books from the three launch partners, but eventually the company will expand advertising to other publishers and to companies from outside the book business. Prior to its launch two years ago, Bookish had announced an advertising and content syndication deal with AOL Huffington Post, but that’s off the drawing board for now. A company spokeswoman told me Bookish is “in discussions about continuing to work with AOL in the future.”

Not a focus: Social, self-publishing

Other publishers can sign an agreement with Bookish to add their titles to the site. (Khazaei told me Bookish doesn’t charge publishers anything to join, but they presumably have to fulfill a number of requirements to be included.) However, self-published authors can’t add their books. “The focus right now is on traditionally published titles,” Khazaei said.

Also at launch, the social features that are a key part of Goodreads’ mission are absent from Bookish. Users can’t friend or follow each other — the focus is on a reader’s individual interests. I found that refreshing: Just because you’re Facebook friends with someone doesn’t mean that he or she shares your book preferences, and I prefer the algorithm-driven approach.

As mentioned by Publishers Lunch last week and reported by the New York Times, BookScout lets users share and save their favorite books within Facebook and recommends new books to them. There are also buy links to multiple retailers.

The app draws on Facebook’s Open Graph to provide recommendations. This is why my initial six book recommendations are about coffee. Because apparently I’ve talked about coffee on Facebook a lot, and I also have it listed as one of my Facebook interests.

I do like coffee — I’m drinking some right now, in fact — but that doesn’t mean I want to read books about it. I’m also not sure why the app seemingly fails to make any recommendations based on the twenty books and authors I have listed as favorites on my actual Facebook page. For example, I say that I like Alice Munro, Jhumpa Lahiri and Evelyn Waugh. Of the many books that BookScout recommended for me, one was by Alice Munro, but several are from romance authors like Debbie Macomber and Danielle Steel (romance is a genre I don’t read and have not listed as an interest — maybe the fact that I got married in 2011 spurred the recommendations?) and one was The Berenstain Bears and Mama for Mayor!

That’s okay, says Random House: the app promises the recommendations will get better the more you use it. Not surprisingly, the more you refine your recommendations (marking a book “not interested,” for example), the better those recommendations will get. I’ll give it a couple more days, but so far the most intriguing part of this app seems to be the fact that it’s recommending books from across publishers. The Facebook Open Graph integration is only cool if it works.

We’ll be discussing tools and strategies that publishers can use to improve personalized recommendations at the paidContent Live conference on April 17, 2013 in New York. For more details and to buy tickets, go here.

Libboo’s goal is to build buzz around books by connecting “buzzers,” or “readers who love to share and talk about books,” with books in order to “create the next digital bestseller and help talented authors get discovered.” They’re asked to do things like post a book’s cover to Facebook or write a blog post about a book and tweet the link to the post. In return, they get rewards like free ebooks.

Libboo, based in Cambridge, Mass., was founded by Chris Howard, a food writer and former teaching assistant at Harvard.

Last week, Boston-based publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt partnered with Libboo to promote new titles Diving Belles by Lucy Wood, The Heart and the Fist by Eric Greitens and How Children Succeed by Paul Tough, as well as a number of backlist titles.

Hubspot founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah, Avid and Wildfire founder Bill Warner, and former Compete CEO Don McLagan also participated in the round.

Goodreads presented new data about the habits of its 7 million users at Tools of Change this week. Goodreads users added 110 million books to their virtual shelves in 2011, and they are adding 14 million more every month. They’ve added 63 million books to their “to-read” shelves, and Goodreads considers those the books they’ve discovered.

Goodreads defines discovery as “all the touchpoints in the mind of the consumer it takes them to decide to purchase and read a book.” That can be conversations, e-mails, tweets, Facebook posts, IMs, blog posts, pins, comments and so on. And Goodreads says it takes about six to twelve touchpoints in the mind of the consumer
to get to a purchase.

Often, discovery is through search on the site. Nineteen percent of Goodreads users said their primary mode of discovery was search — when they hear about a book somewhere, search for it and add it to their to-read list. Search gets the “long tail,” less popular books:

Thirteen percent of Goodreads users primarily found books through the site’s recommendation engine, which uses data based on the books they’ve read and rated to deliver new suggestions. Goodreads Recommendations are “designed to hit the mid-list sweet spot,” books that are not big, popular titles. “Avid” readers — which Goodreads defines as people who read at least 49 books per year, or about one a week — are more likely to discover books through Goodreads Recommendations than “casual” readers, who read a book a month or less.

That’s why Goodreads recommends that publishers of mid-list titles “focus on marketing to readers of your comparable titles. They will put your book on the right lists and ensure the recommendation algorithm picks it up.”

In an attempt to fill this discovery gap, Rhomberg has founded Jellybooks, a book discovery and sharing tool that will also offer Groupon-type book deals to its users.

According to Rhomberg, “We use similar principles as those employed by last.fm to make it easier to find great, but possibly obscure books. Our goal is to break the tyranny of the bestseller list. There are truly great books that appear on no bestseller list.”

Set to launch in early spring, the Jellybooks experience corrects some common mistakes in online book browsing, says Rhomberg: “We have spent many months trying to understand why physical bookshops still play such an important role in discovery.” For example, people really do use book covers in deciding what to read, so you won’t see thumbnail reductions. Interestingly (but very right when you think about it), cost isn’t much of a factor in choosing a book: “We found that price information plays very, very little role when users try to decide what makes for a great read. Clearly it matters when they have decided to buy a book at which point they will shop around (i.e. buy online and not in a physical store), but during the discovery process, price information is not a factor, so lets get rid of it.”

Once a user finds a book that looks interesting, they can download the first 10% to a personal cloud library account to read later on a device of their choice. These samples will be available two to six weeks before the title appears in stores. There’s no DRM, and they can be shared with a link without restriction. Rhomberg envisions this as a useful tool for recommending books to friends via email and social networks, but also for bloggers, authors, and journalists: “Think of how video clips are shared by posting a YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) link and now imagine the same for e-books.” At the end of the excerpt is a link allowing the reader to buy the book at their store of choice.

At this point, the reader is buying directly from an online retailer, not Jellybooks. Some retailers might pay a small referral fee, but Rhomberg says that “is not materially significant to the model.” No, what Jellybooks gets out of the discovery process is information: “Our discovery service is designed to shed light on what readers sample, what they share, and how they are influenced. The concept of sharable links allows us to measure how recommendations spread between readers and measure specific influence.”

Once you’ve started browsing, downloading, and sharing, Jellybooks will use the information it has gathered to offer you special 50-percent off “Sweet Deals” on books that fit well with your choices so far. Not every Jellybooks user will be notified about every sale. “Books are quite personal and you don’t want people to get the wrong perception that they’re getting irrelevant stuff or too much stuff. So your reading and sharing behavior allows us to determine if you would be interested in getting the deal.”

Similar to Groupon (NSDQ: GRPN), the deal only happens if enough people sign on to purchase, which means sharing is important for attaining the required number. If it’s reached within the 12-hour span, the book is downloaded (Sweet Deals are currently e-books only) and your credit card is charged. One important difference from Groupon, Rhomberg notes, is that “the discount has to be earned by the group as a whole. With Groupon it often just automatically goes over. Here we don’t want you to feel it’s too automatic and so you’re lazy…In its nuances it’s constructed to be a little more social and a little bit more about recommendations.”

Publishers nominate books to be Sweet Deals, and, if selected, stipulate the number that must be sold for the deal to take place. The deals can be used to give a book a second wind six to nine months after publication, to promote a previous title when an author has a new publication, to expose readers to a first book in a series, or to sell bundles of backlist books. So far, “publishers’ reception has been very, very positive, because discoverability is an issue of enormous importance to them and their authors.”

Jellybooks will initially launch in the UK, but plans are in place “to be live in over dozens more countries supporting e-books in multiple languages by the end of 2012.”

This story originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives, a website of global publishing news and opinion.

The author is Amanda DeMarco, a contributing editor for Publishing Perspectives. She also edits Readux: Reading in Berlin.

This article originally appeared in Publishing Perspectives.