Emily Gould and Ruth Curry met while working at a publishing house, so it seems only natural the duo would one day go into the book business themselves. Emily Books, the brain child of Gould and Curry, works like this: users sign up for an e-book subscription service that automatically delivers one e-book a month, hand-picked by Gould and Curry. Membership also boasts “access to exclusive events and priceless feelings of satisfaction, sophistication, and intellectual superiority,” which, in other words, is an enormous undertaking for under $200.
The e-book concierges sat down with City Unlisted to talk about the future of publishing and what makes their subscription-based model worth trying.
You’ve confessed that at first you hated e-books. What made you change your mind?
EG: We resisted them because we love books and have huge book collections and love all the stuff people always talk about: the smell, turning pages, etc. But I was converted the first time I boarded a flight with a 50% lighter carry-on bag, thanks to the book-stocked iPad it contained. Ruth was converted when a 3 a.m. impulse purchase of a [Young Adult] series kept her up all night, flipping the virtual pages of her Kindle.
What made you realize there was a need for a subscription-based service for e-books?
EG: We realized that pretty much everyone has an e-reader—your phone is an e-reader—but they might not have time or inclination to keep it stocked with new and unexpected things to read all the time. Enter us!
Who selects the books your subscribers will receive? What criteria must a book meet to be included?
RC: Emily and I pick the books based on a complicated top-secret algorithm. No, just kidding! We pick the books based on whether or not we passionately love them.
EG: We also have to be able to spend a month thinking about the books and their authors every day without getting bored. It’s a tall order, but we’re really proud of the books we picked.
On EmilyBooks.com, you say “Emily Books is the first independent e-bookstore.”
EG: It’s the first independent e-book store that we know of! Some small publishers have been selling electronic editions of the books that they publish, but we aren’t a publisher. And you can opt either to subscribe or to buy any of the books we sell à la carte.
How do your selections skew?
RC: We want to feature a lot of different books. But the two of us have a penchant for slept-on female novelists.
EG: And memoirists. And I guess, looking at the list, there is a New York bent to our taste, for sure.
Although you’re selling e-books, you say this method supports independent bookselling culture, how so?
RC: So far we haven’t seen an active independent bookselling community in the electronic marketplace. We want our store to be the first of many. We want you to be able to buy e-books from a lot of different stores with different interests and strengths, and not just cross your fingers that Amazon has what you want to read.
EG: We also want to interact with customers, getting to know their taste and recommending things, the way our favorite booksellers do. That’s something missing from e-book selling culture right now.
What is it about Emily Books that’s more valuable than downloading books yourself on Amazon or iBooks, without a subscription model?
RC: When you buy from us, you’re supporting a diverse culture of sustaining writers, publishers, and booksellers. It’s sort of like buying the organic local strawberries at the farmers’ market instead of the genetically modified ones at Gristedes. They cost a little bit more, but they taste WAY better and they’re better for farmers and for the environment. Plus we are really cool and will turn you on to great books you may not have heard of.
Do you have an ideal author you’d like to feature?
RC: Emily Books basically exists because we both really really wanted to get people to read “I Love Dick” by Chris Kraus. We’ll get there one of these days.
