Earlier this week, we were invited to the offices of Simon & Schuster, where chief digital officer Elinor Hirschhorn gave us a guided tour of the company's new website, which had been in an unannounced public beta since last Thursday. One of the main impetuses for the makeover, she told us, was to separate out the information for consumers from that provided to booksellers, academics, and other corporate interests (which have been moved to SimonandSchuster.net). The new site features a clean, streamlined look (using the Arial typeface) that immediately welcomes readers, using slideshows and "shelf menus" to compress a bunch of information into a tiny space without a sense of clutter. "The goal was to create a site that was engaging," Hirschhorn said, that made searches easier but could also foster discovery. "I think we've done a better job of allowing people to sample books," she added, noting how the site's pages integrated basic descriptions of the company's books with excerpts, author questionnaires and blogs, extensive multimedia content and other forms of contextualized information.

Drilling down through the features, Hirschhorn called our attention to the "Facebook/360-degree" approach to allowing S&S authors' personalities to come through on the page—in addition to the exclusive content authors create for the site, Simon & Schuster continually scrapes the web for news items, blog mentions, the authors' own RSS feeds, Facebook status updates and Twitter streams... There's also a steadily growing community aspect, as customers add reviews and contribute to ongoing discussion threads, all of which are keyed to the main book pages. "We pack a lot in," she said proudly, "but we hope it helps people get to the information they want quickly."

Later, we heard from S&S CEO Carolyn Reidy, who says she loves the author-generated content, along with a section that maps out author appearances and allows readers to set up email reminders for when their favorite authors are coming to their local bookstore or making a TV appearance. "Now that the internet has given us the ability for us to present our authors directly to their readers—in so many new ways and on a round-the-clock basis that wasn’t previously possible—it is particularly important for us to have a first class site that showcases our authors as the stars that they are, and provides information about them that is unavailable elsewhere," Reidy wrote. "We face a lot of competition—other publishers and other media—and you don’t get too many chances to communicate with and capture an audience. Our site has to provide compelling content that engages immediately, and makes it easy for visitors to discover our books."

Reidy also acknowledged that the site would enable S&S to accumulate data about consumer interests based on site usage and direct feedback—a point that bears emphasizing. We don't think it's overstating the case to say that most publishers spent a good part of the last decade allowing somebody else (often, but not always, a certain online bookstore) to "own" the primary relationship with reader-consumers. In recent years, it's been authors who first took the lead in reclaiming that territory, but publishers have been steadily waking up to their responsibility. And, yes, some of us still have our concerns about the difficulty large, general-interest publishers may have in presenting and defining themselves to readers and making those relationships work (as opposed to smaller publishers with distinctive identities based on their narrower focuses). But if we've learned anything over the years, it's that we can't treat our concerns as certainties, and we can't act like "difficult" is a synonym for "impossible." Simon & Schuster's new website knows when to step out of the way and let the books and authors speak for themselves, and that's an important step in the right direction.