Publishers Lunch and Publishers Marketplace have created Publishers Lunch Bookateria, a website that offers more than two million titles for sale through a range of retail partners: Indiebound, iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and Amazon. The site is managed and merchandised by Publishers Lunch; Random House built the site and provides technology, staff and support services.
Publishers Lunch will receive standard affiliate commissions offered by the retailers it links to. The site expects to run "a limited amount of ads" eventually, although that's not a priority now.
Publishers Lunch founder Michael Cader described Bookateria as an "online discovery store for books" that is focused initially on "our core audiences--the 45,000 daily Publishers Lunch recipients, and the broader 100,000 or so unique monthly visitors to Publishers Marketplace." This audience includes "a lot of serious book-lovers--including authors, librarians, film and TV people, media, bloggers and more."
Cader continued: "We know from our readers that every new deal report and daily news item triggers purchase impulses among our audience, who are avid book consumers. So we've long been looking for a solution that lets us connect the news and our proprietary data directly to a store environment to drive book sales, while supporting the entire bookselling environment, without favoring any one party or competing directly with booksellers who provide such a valuable service." He hopes that the initial core audience will share their enthusiasm with a broader audience that will be interested in an insider's view of hot books and authors.
Bookateria features include Books in the News and highlights of new books published or announced and authors newly signed, as well as extensive lists of titles that include booksellers recommendations, such as the ABA's IndieBound program. The catalogue also gives agents, authors and others a place to link to promote discovery and sale of their own books.
On the site, Publishers Lunch Bookateria emphasized that it is creating "a complete private environment for searching books. We do not identify or track your book browsing at all, and no algorithms will come to dubious conclusions about your reading habits."
Cader added that the site "lets us connect a lot of what we do directly to books and the ability to purchase, which should benefit the entire community. And in that way, it represents our answer to the common concerns about enhancing book discovery online--if everyone who cares about books, authors and the publishing and bookselling ecosystem that supports them finds a way to share what they know with their natural audiences, good things will come."