O Magazine App Shows Digital Magazines Are the Next Bookstores

Next month's O: The Magazine summer reads digital issue will have a special feature: Excerpts from the actual books and easy click-through to purchase them. Borders and other book stores may be suffering, but sales through leading magazines like Oprah Winfrey's O could push book profits back to previous levels. In other words, digital magazines may just be the new bookstores.

O's popular summer reading feature will have 21 of the 28 books will be available for purchase (the remaining publishers might want to create a Kindle or Nook edition before it hits digital newsstands). Readers can buy them on the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle or the Barnes & Noble (BKS) Nook.

Readers can always hop over to their Nook or Kindle and buy the recommended books, but, as Laura Hazard Owen of MocoNews notes, streamlining the purchasing increases the chances that they'll buy:

Of course, readers can already read free excerpts of many of these books online-with first chapters available free through Kindle, for instance. But it's easier to read excerpts from a curated list already in front of you on an iPad, and it could be the extra inducement readers need to buy.

Replacing the bookstore
Unfortunately for bookstores, this is the future of book selling. There are arguably two reasons to go to a bookstore:

• To create social experiences built around books
• To get hand-picked recommendations from the staff

Social networking and messaging services like Facebook and Twitter are replacing the discussions usually had between the book aisles. In fact, online social experiences can be broader since they literally connect you with the rest of the world, not just people at your neighborhood bookstore.

And, as it seems, magazines and other multimedia will replace the knowledgeable staff within bookstores. Oprah already drove millions to the bookstore with her book picks well before e-readers took off, so there's no reason to believe the same can't happen on the digital front.

It's telling that the other major reading influence, the New Yorker, went digital a few months ago. We can bet it will deliver clickable book recommendations soon, and other digital magazines will follow suit, too, turning once-static magazines into their own virtual bookstores.

Photo courtesy of nayrb7 // CC 2.0
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