A New Book Discovery App, Backed by Ingram, Looks Promising

Barnes & Noble’s Browsery. Litsy from LibraryThing. NetGalley’s Bookish. Ingram’s Bookfinity. Even Lit Hub from Grove Atlantic.

These are all efforts in recent years to resolve book publishing’s discoverability “problem.” The industry has long wanted a popular consumer offering that would help readers find their next great read, usually expressed as a “Netflix for books” or “Spotify for books,” but without the subscription business model, of course. (Do discoverability and subscription go hand in hand? A question for another time.)

Whether book discoverability is a pressing problem faced by readers is something reasonable people can debate. Still, most agree Amazon is pretty terrible at recommending what you should read next (especially as paid placements have taken over), and there’s dwindling coverage for books at media outlets. Book conversations have increasingly moved to social media platforms like Twitter, BookTok and Bookstagram. Publishers yearn for more powerful and reliable ways to spread word of mouth that can’t get sidelined by the latest political news cycle or the vagaries of Amazon’s algorithms and advertising.

Enter Tertulia, a new app for book discovery that combines AI and editorial curation. We’ve had an early look at the app (currently invite-only), and it’s well designed, thoughtful, and enjoyable to use. When you first join, you’re asked for your genre and category preferences as well as the kinds of people/institutions you appreciate recommendations from (e.g., book critics, journalists and wonks, voices in science, history buffs, and so on). Once inside, you have a few options for browsing.

• Today: Each day, you are presented with a unique selection of five books based on your expressed preferences.
• Explore (also titled Voices Selected for You): These are book recommendations from categories of people you selected. In our testing, the top recommendation was The Family Roe, arising from a tweet by Deborah Friedell, a contributing editor to the London Review of Books. According to the app’s co-founder, Sebastian Cwilich, Tertulia’s team determines the “voices” who power book recommendations, and they’re constantly adding more based on feedback.
• Trending (also titled Most Talked About): We didn’t find any surprises here when we browsed the app. It’s more or less like a bestseller list that allows you to navigate top titles in broad and niche categories (fiction, nonfiction, crime & thrillers, tech & science, and so on). The most talked-about fiction at the time of this writing was Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, recently adapted into a TV show that premiered on Hulu May 15. That said, there was zero overlap between Tertulia’s Most Talked About fiction list and the current New York Times fiction bestseller list, although most titles under “trending” have been on a bestseller list at one point or another. When we asked Cwilich how this trending list is generated, he said, “The foundation is to look at the number of mentions for each book in the past 30 days, which means it’s updated every day (rolling 30 days back).” The Tertulia team then does some further “tweaking” to correct for algorithmic errors or “lower-quality mentions.”

When you find a title that interests you, you can read more about it and purchase the print edition through the app. (Audiobooks and ebooks are to come later.) You’ll find notable accolades (there’s a special designation, Loved by Critics) as well as the average rating on Goodreads. And then—the best part—is the “top mentions” collected from social media, where readers discuss the book in their own words. Right now, these top mentions are pulled from Twitter and can be found underneath any book, offering insight into which authors and books are still being avidly discussed, and by whom, long after their release.

That said, in our look at the app, newer books—usually those released within the last five years—were most likely to be surfaced. That’s to be expected if the app is using social media conversation to drive discovery; people are more likely to talk about the new stuff. Cwilich said Tertulia may create sections that more explicitly highlight new releases, but certainly there’d be value as well in surfacing older, overlooked gems you’re less likely to hear about. Just our two cents.

In the New York Times article about the app, we caught a whiff of elitism that often surrounds book coverage. Author Sloane Crosley said, “What the app might do is drown out the chaos and lowest common denominator opinions with something that resembles actual discourse about books. If Tertulia can bring up the average discourse about books, long may they reign.” Maybe Crosley is thinking here of reader reviews at Amazon and Goodreads? It’s not clear. But Tertulia’s most interesting features are partly driven by what people are saying on social media. The most powerful book recommendations today (those that lead to sales) can be found on BookTok and are overwhelmingly driven by the authenticity and emotion of the reader. Is that “actual discourse about books”? We’d say yes, and this app has the power to capture that for people who have little time for or interest in scouring social media for their next read. For now, though, Tertulia depends heavily on what people are saying on Twitter and doesn’t feature any BookTok recommendations at all. Cwilich says adding more sources is a matter of “when not if.”

Tertulia will offer a membership program for $25 per year. Membership perks include unlimited free shipping and a 10 percent discount on all books. Members will also earn “co-ownership units” in proportion to their book purchases and become part of the Tertulia Co-op. (Learn more.)

Ingram is a partner and investor in Tertulia and will fulfill and ship orders placed through the app. The app has raised $6 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors such as Sky Dayton (founder of EarthLink), AlleyCorp, Jon Oringer (founder of Shutterstock), and Bob Pittman (founder of MTV), among others.

Bottom line: The current iteration of the app leans toward literature with a capital L, and the curated voices tend to be of the serious variety. Want to find the most-talked-about romance? The category is not listed under Trending. Nor are graphic novels and comics. Such titles do surface in the app in other ways, and of course you can search for any book or author you like. Cwilich said Tertulia is planning to add more categories, including timely/topical ones like “Ukraine-related books” and geography-related categories like “Most talked about in New York City.”

While the app is missing some user customization/preferences that we’d expect for a book discovery tool, it’s still early days and not even possible for most people to get access. Tertulia has already collected considerable feedback from authors and others in the publishing community that will inform development. Cwilich told us, “We gained greater conviction in our overall approach from a prominent author who said that she loved that the app places ‘a little more trust in the curiosity and intelligence of readers.’ A key premise in what we’re doing has always been that ambitious readers don’t want it spoonfed to them from a single source but rather want to be ‘in the know’—and we’re trying to do that in a way that’s elegant, fun, and not too overwhelming.”