Social Media

Neil Baptista hopes that booklovers everywhere are adding another site to their go-to social media bookmarks: Riffle. As founder and CEO of the startup, Baptista wanted to create a website where readers, bloggers, and bookstore owners alike could come together and share their bookshelves -- and thoughts -- with each other.

A recent Pew study found that millennials are more likely to have read a book in the past year than Americans over the age of 30. The finding flies in the face of a popular critique of millennials: that all they consume is Internet frippery - listicles, parodies, memes and quizzes. When Kanye West released "Bound 2" last year, the music video became instant fodder for parodies by the likes of South Park and Saturday Night Live. But you might have missed "Hardcover Bound 2," a parody by Annabelle Quezada and La Shea Delaney that replaces rhymes about Kardashian with lines about books.

Ebook subscription service Oyster has launched a new discovery tool today called, "Book Lists." The feature allows users to curate and share personalized book lists with select Oyster users or more widely on social media. The feature, like fellow subscription service Bookmate's "book playlists," adds a level of social interaction to the book selection process and provides greater exposure to Oyster's titles and the platform itself.

When I received the Brooklyn Public Library's recent email newsletter promoting a new service called BookMatch, I was both delighted and dismayed.

On the one hand, it was a great idea. All I had to do was fill out a short web form letting the librarians know a bit about what I wanted to read and what I liked to read, and one promised to write back with five personalized recommendations tailored to my interests and tastes. On the other, the fact I was so delighted was exactly what was dismaying.

If there was a Queen of Twitter it would have to be HarperCollins UK's Head of Events, Sam Missingham (@samatlounge). She pretty much adores - or takes an interest in - all social media, but retains a special affection for Twitter, where she now has some 13,500 followers. As such she was the perfect person to speak at the Frankfurt Book Fair Business Club's session on social media, "Uncensored! Social Media - Marketing Heaven or Hell?" earlier this month.

A wave of titles written by YouTube personalities hits the shelves this month as book publishers bet on the power of online media. WSJ's Rolfe Winkler reports.

Penguin Random House said it needs to move to online spaces where "our audiences are already present", and will close its teen book community Spinebreakers on 30th September.

The Spinebreakers site was set up in 2007 as a place for young people to talk about books and write reviews or stories, and in 2010 between 10,000 and 15,000 people visited it every month. However, last month its members received an email from Penguin Random House saying that community was to close "after seven fantastic years".

Swoon Reads, a young-adult imprint that is part of Macmillan Publishing, is upending the traditional discovery process by using crowdsourcing to select all its titles. By bringing a reality-television-style talent competition to its digital slush pile, the publisher is hoping to find potential best sellers that reflect not editors' tastes but the collective wisdom and whims of the crowd.

"The fans and the readers are more in touch with what can sell," said Jean Feiwel, senior vice president of the Macmillan Children's Publishing Group and publisher of Swoon Reads

Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell will publish his next work of fiction in 140-character instalments on Twitter.

The British novelist has written a short story called The Right Sort which readers can enjoy in bitesize chunks over the next seven days, twice a day.

There will be 20 tweets at a time and a total of 280 tweets for the story narrated by a teenage boy who discovers Valium. A cluster of tweets have already been tweeted via his Twitter handle, @david_mitchell.

Starting today, you can submit your questions directly to any of the 54 authors participating in the Ask the Author launch. (Full list below!) If an author answers your question you'll be notified, and every answer will be shared on the author's page so that other readers can enjoy them, too. In the coming weeks, all of the 100,000+ authors in the Goodreads Author program will be able to opt in to the feature. (To check whether an author is participating, visit his or her author profile