In November, Paul reported on HarperCollins closing an e-book store nobody knew about. Now it appears the company is closing a book social network nobody knew about as well. At least, this is the first I’d heard of it, and I try to follow Internet book news as closely as I can.
The Bookseller reports that BookArmy launched in March, 2009, and is closing due to lack of advertising opportunities and competition from similar sites such as Library Thing, Shelfari, and GoodReads (which I had heard of). It will close on December 21, and its staff will be folded into HarperCollins’s unpublished author site authonomy.com.
It’s not really too surprising, all in all. There’s only room for so many sites in a particular niche, and when more recognizable names have it filled the lesser-known ones get bumped out. I wasn’t too impressed by BookArmy’s site design, either, which seems like a bunch of random sections thrown together in a distracting way.
I would disagree the book army website was fine, the designed worked it just was not promoted well and it lost in search engines a bit. There were many of us who used the website for book reviews and it will be missed. Harpers obviously couldnt make money and that’s about the size of it.