I would be lost without this wonderful email service. I also would have a lot more money in my pocket! Any New Books? sends you email alerts about new books in a number of categories that you pick yourself – they have 42 of them. I mentioned them a while back, but they are so good that I need to mention them again. For example, they just alerted me to the publication of Glen Cook’s last volume of the Dread Empire series, A Path to the Coldness of Heart.
Here is what they say about themselves:
What is Any New Books?
‘Any New Books?’ is a free notification service that was developed to alert you to new books in categories of your choice. You can currently select from 42 categories that span a broad range of subjects (you’re free to pick however many categories you’d like). For each category that you select when you sign up, you will receive one weekly digest of hand-picked new book releases. The selection process is not automated, because we believe a human editor is better able to pick books that will better appeal to a wide audience.
Why did you start this service?
We were looking for a similar service for ourselves, however we were unable to find one and so decided to build just such a service in order to promote new books for fellow readers. We use the service ourselves and have designed it so as to be something that we genuinely love using.
Who are you?
We are a small team of people who are passionate about reading and books. We are located in Canada, but primarily service an English-speaking public at this time. You can contact us at any time by email at info@anynewbooks.com. Our mailing address is: AnyNewBooks.com, 808 York Mills Road, PO Box 36005, Toronto, Ontario M5B 1X8, Canada.
Great idea and probably a great service if you meet at least two of three conditions: (1) you buy pbooks; (2) you own a Kindle; (3) you shop at Amazon.
The only ebooks the site promotes or links to are Kindle ebooks. The only bookstore the site links to (and thus probably searches) is Amazon. Basically, the site is a shill for Amazon. Does anyone know if Amazon is behind-the-scenes financing this endeavor?
One other thing. If you prefer not to get e-mails (I get way too many as it is), they also post the information in the Archives. You can get the weekly picks — current and past — by choosing Archives and the genre.
I think I might have preferred that you not have mentioned it again… 😀
Thank you for the mention, Paul. We truly appreciate you helping us spreading the word.
Thank you for your feedback, Richard. We are not owned/promoted/endorsed/invested in by Amazon. We are Amazon Associates members, which means that we get a cut of each sale made via our service (much like other bloggers do). This is what allows the service to be free, and not charge our users a membership fee.
The reason why we use Amazon, is that it is the largest marketplace and it provides us with an API that we can use to retrive programmatically books and then allow our editors to use our custom made software to perform manual selections.
Once you discover a book with our service, you can certainly buy wherever you like, and many of our users do (including purchasing at physical stores). We mostly focus on the discovery aspect of the service.
We’ll work to integrate other systems as well in the future (e.g., epub, Kobo, etc), but we are a small team and we have limited resources at the moment.
Cheers,
Antonio
I don’t have any problem with it being (at least for now) a service that makes its money from Amazon affiliate links. I do think though that Tele-Read should have mentioned it.