GetGlue, an online community that has positioned itself as a sort of Four Square for media, where users can get recommendations on books, movies, TV, and other media, has started partnering with book publishers. The launch today of 13 book “stickers” ties in to a few of this summer’s big books, including The Passage and the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series.
GetGlue’s 500,000 registered users can tell others what they’re currently reading, watching, and even drinking. Every month, users make 1.5 million ratings. Now, with the addition of stickers, they can add some cachet to their profile. When they note that they’re reading Justin Cronin's The Passage, Ballantine’s summer vampire doorstopper, they qualify for the Passage sticker, a circular logo bearing a portion of the book jacket, which is placed on their GetGlue page. Some stickers--such as the ones for Passage and Dragon Tattoo--are easy to acquire, while others--such as the one for O’Reilly Media--entail “checking in” to at least five O’Reilly titles. GetGlue director of business development Ami Greko, who previously worked at Macmillan and Tor.com, said getting stickers is a way for people to “get a little ego boost” and “another way for them to indicate ‘this is what I’m interested in.'"
Right now, GetGlue has 13 book stickers from Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, O'Reilly, Harper, and Indiebound, and Norton is joining in soon. Stickers are available for the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, The Passage, Kraken by China Mieville, Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk, Little Bee by Chris Cleave, Lost Souls by Dean Koontz, Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick, and The Parasol Protectorate series by Gail Carringer. Individual author stickers are available for David Pogue and Haruki Murakami, and stickers are also available for O'Reilly Hacker Essentials, O'Reilly Mobile Essentials, and Indiebound's Indie Next list. Future stickers may include more obscure titles, Greko said.
Greko said GetGlue chooses to make stickers for books that it thinks its users--people who tend to have “strong cross-vertical tastes in books, movies, music, TV shows, and video games”--will be interested in. Publishers do not pay for stickers, at least not for now. GetGlue has partnered with other media media companies on stickers, including Showtime, Warner Bros, Random House, Universal Pictures, and PBS.
