Press Release: Simon & Schuster Launches Books Section With Social Media Platform Milq

"It's inspiring to work with the team at Simon & Schuster, who see in Milq the many ways to create new experiences around books and engaging ways to connect with the authors themselves," says Milq co-founder Don Mackinnon. "We're in love with Walter Isaacson's Bead - it's so great to see all the vintage video of the advances in technology he writes about in the book, and we can't wait to see what the rest of the world adds to the conversation."

The launch of Books follows Milq's recent collaboration with the Toronto International Film Festival and with Vanity Fair, Spin, VICE, Tribeca Film Festival, Kings of Leon, Ken Burns, Paul Giamatti, and many more. Milq will continue to unveil significant media, sports and artist partnerships throughout the fall. As reported on in an article by Ben Sisario in The New York Times, Milq debuted out of private beta earlier this year with the aim of becoming the front door for how people experience culture.

Just as with film and music, readers share their favorite books by adding them to thematic playlists. Users can also employ Milq's unique features to take their reading further. Readers have already begun creating playable footnotes to existing books called MilqNotes featuring audio and video linked to the book's content. See examples built around a biography of James Brown here and a novel by Thomas Pynchon here.

MILQ BACKGROUND

Milq's three founders, Don MacKinnon, Jordan Jacobs and Tomi Poutanen, have unique expertise in cultural curation and building massive collaborative knowledge networks, and are backed by a who's who of investors from the worlds of media, tech and finance, including former Viacom CEO Tom Freston, former IMG CEO and current Bacardi CEO Michael Dolan, Etsy and SmartThings exec Maria Thomas, tech entrepreneur and angel investor Daniel Debow and execs from Google and Goldman Sachs.