BookBub – it’s Groupon for ebooks

In 2010, the daily deals website Groupon launched a competition to find a person willing to live off nothing but their discount vouchers for a year – in return for $100,000 (£66,000) cash at the end of it. They weren’t short of entrants, and the winner, a 28-year-old unemployed accountant from Chicago named Josh Stevens, even made it over to the UK as part of his discount tour.

While he made it through the whole year without breaking the competition rules, making it work included plenty of bartering with strangers and sleeping on floors – you don’t get a free hotel deal every night, it turned out, and you have to stick close to the sort of places where they need your money: big cities, small players and lots of competition.

Since signing up to BookBub, a daily special-offers service for ebooks, I haven’t tried to emulate Mr Stevens. Having requested recommendations from the autobiography, history, non-, sci- and lit-fiction categories, the three to five recommendations that pop into my inbox every day have duly cleaved to the Groupon style: mostly self-published works, bios of the less authorised kind, and multi-book epics with interesting cover fonts. They’re definitely good deals, though, with most discounted to 99p, and plenty of free offers. Which is probably why my younger sibling, a recent graduate who devours several books a week, recommended it so highly.

BookBub’s own figures confirm these biases: the average subscriber reads seven books a month (and romance fans, who account for 20% of sales, read 11). BookBub launched in the UK just last September, so the selection is still pretty US-centric (although available everywhere), and with more than 4 million members and 10m books sold, it’s worth remembering there’s a world of other kinds of reading out there.