Worried about Amazon buying up GoodReads? Have no fear: Random House, Inc have launched BookScout a new social book discovery app on Facebook. The app allows readers to create and organize their own digital bookshelves and explore friends’ bookshelves to learn what others are reading. BookScout encourages organic word-of-mouth recommendations as people can share what they’re currently reading with their Facebook friends, tag books they’d like to read, and keep track of books they’ve read. The app also provides personalized book recommendations from all publishers, and includes links to major retailers so people can easily purchase print books and eBooks they’re interested in.

Sophie asked Amanda Close, SVP Digital Marketplace Development, some more questions to find out why the app has been made, what the plans are for future and how the analytics are forming future growth strategies…

At some stage last week while I was asleep, buy buttons were removed from Big 6 (5?) publishers Hachette, Penguin, Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster. What followed was a brief turd storm of concern, blame and speculation about what these publishers had done to bring forth the wrath of Bezos, followed by a ‘statement’ from Amazon a while later saying it was a technical glitch (ie: they sent out an email with ‘technical glitch’ as the subject line and blank body text, probs).

Last week saw the declaration by Amazon that the dissolution of agency pricing in the US was a “big win for customer“ and that they look forward to lowering prices on more ebooks in the future. It’s slightly surreal for me to read that lower ebook prices is something anyone would ‘look forward’ to, given how much effort publishers are making (not across the board, but certainly in some places) to ensure the price of ebooks stays at a level that encourages a sense of worth for the format. Testament to Amazon’s place in the market, however, the news was not received badly.

In news that has gone so far from the definition of ‘news’ that it has circled back round upon itself to become newsworthy again, today sees the publication of JK Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter novel, the adult-orientated The Casual Vacancy. I know, it caught me utterly unawares too. Take a minute to regain your composure and lift your jaw off the floor, why don’t you.

Little, Brown is the company currently looking at its logo on the spine of the book, then looking at the rest of the publishing world, then looking at the Harry Potter series’ sales figures, then looking back at the rest of the publishing world and pointing and laughing.

Last week saw the release of a new Kobo range, and (not to be outdone) the yearly release of the new Kindle line. Despite Bezos’ insistence that he doesn’t need his customers on the ‘upgrade treadmill’, Amazon released an upgrade to pretty much every single one of their devices, including two new Kindle Fire tablets and the predicted backlit eInk reader. So, as readers, what are we looking at for Christmas this year?

Late on Friday night, a tweet from the writer Alan Gillespie appeared on my feed that read ‘Read @jeremyduns‘ timeline for a literary Hollyoaks episode. Mental.’ It was accompanied by retweets of Ian Rankin, saying ‘I’m sitting here, numb, staring at @jeremyduns timeline this evening…. ‘, and of Duns himself, who said ‘If you want to read my tweets about RJ Ellory’s sockpuppeting, @stevemosby has kindly just collated them’ and linked to this Storify thread.

Sales figures. A detailed breakdown of sales of devices by country, including market share, plus a deep look into the data they hold for each customer, as well as how their recommendation system works. CEO Jeff Bezos is likely to unveil their print-to-ebook sales ratio, alongside comparative figures of how each version of Kindle has sold over a specific date range. He will announce the collaborative work he is doing with publishers and retailers to move toward an aggregated eBook sales chart similar to Neilsen’s Bookscan, and his plans to be far more transparent with the press in the future regarding profitability and strategy.

HA! Ok, enough of that.

You know how before you got to see The Avengers you had to sit through all the Iron Mans and Captain Americas and Scandinavian God Fall Downs, so that all the preliminary character work was done and blowing stuff up could commence immediately? Well, that’s an exceedingly generous analogy to draw to the contents of this post, which brings news of new deals for two separate e-readers before both join forces with a third. 3D glasses will not be provided, but if you’re reading this on public transportation then we can offer you something approximating a D-Box seat.

Evidently determined to prove that Barnes and Noble isn’t the only digital bookseller that can expand to new territories this week, why should it be?, Amazon is taking the Kindle to India. Hear that Barnes and Noble? That’s the second most highly populated country in the world – 1,241,491,960 people at last count, second only to China. ‘Suddenly getting a foot in the door of a market with a population of 62,641,000 doesn’t seem quite so great an achievement, does it?’ asked Amazon, as it got Barnes and Noble in a headlock, shoved it face first into the nearest toilet and encouraged it to ‘drink it up!’ as it hit flush. 

It’s a moment everyone always knew was coming, and it’s finally here: Amazon said yesterday that sales of Kindle downloads have officially sailed past print sales in the UK. Of course, it can say anything it likes, because its figures remain unaudited and, given the lack of further comment on the matter, look likely to remain that way. If you’re prepared to take the omnimegahyperconglomerate (or whatever) at its word, however, then for every 100 print books it has sold so far in 2012 in the UK, 114 of its paid-for e-books have been downloaded (and if you’re really, really bad at maths, that means that e-book sales are 14% higher than print sales). UK Kindle owners are apparently buying on average four times as many books now as they did before buying the device.