BookArmy

» see bookarmy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

A publisher's marketing project aimed at the British trade fiction market had no route to Ankara in 2009, and it did not try to have one. This is one of the graves where the honest position is that I read the research and nothing else. What I recognize is the shape of the attempt rather than the site, because the same attempt was being made by large companies in every category that year.

BookArmy launched in February 2009, owned by HarperCollins UK together with a partner called Fleming Media. It carried a page for essentially every English-language book with an ISBN, roughly six million titles and authors, with the underlying data coming from Nielsen. You could review books and record the ones you owned, and build a reading list out of what was left. On 25 March it added a video channel for author interviews. The press at the time called it a Last.fm for books, which was both the pitch and the ceiling.

The recommendation engine was the pitch. Tell it what you had read and it would suggest what came next, drawing on other readers with overlapping shelves. In 2009 that was a well-understood idea with several working implementations already in front of it, which is the problem a large incumbent runs into when it enters a category two years after the category settled.

It closed on 21 December 2010. The Bookseller had reported eleven days earlier that HarperCollins was standing it down. The reason given was strong competition from similar sites along with fewer advertising opportunities, which reads like two causes and is really one cause described from both ends.

~ the case file ~

~ what a publisher wanted ~

Publishers spent the 2000s in an odd position. They manufactured the product and carried the risk on every advance, and they still had no idea who bought the finished thing, because the bookshop and later the online retailer stood between them and the reader. BookArmy was HarperCollins trying to reach past that gap and hold the relationship directly.

To do that it had to be useful, which meant carrying every book with an ISBN and not only its own. A recommendation site that only recommends one publisher's list is a catalog. So HarperCollins built and paid for a service whose main function was sending readers toward books published by its competitors, and any advantage it got back was too indirect to defend at a budget meeting. That contradiction sits at the bottom of nearly every publisher-run reader community from that decade.

~ the notice ~

Fewer advertising opportunities is the more honest half of the stated reason. The site was free and ad-supported, and display advertising in late 2010 paid according to traffic. A book site with modest traffic in a market where Goodreads had already taken the habit was not going to clear its own hosting bill, let alone the editorial cost of a video channel.

Twenty two months is roughly the length of one budget cycle plus the argument about renewing it. That is the natural lifespan of a corporate side project that does not hit its first-year numbers, and it has very little to do with whether the product was any good.

~ the pattern ~

The reader social network that won was started in 2006 by Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri, two people with no publishing company behind them and no obligation to any imprint. Amazon bought it in 2013. Shelfari, which Amazon had already bought in 2008, was folded into it and shut down in 2016.

The lesson repeats across categories and nobody in a large company ever quite believes it. Communities form around a neutral party. The moment the host has a commercial interest in one of the things being discussed, everything it recommends gets read as advertising, whether or not it is. HarperCollins could not have fixed that by building a better site.

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