By Dennis Abrams

Random House has announced a partnership with Pinterest to use the service’s first set of APIs (application programming interface) to help users discover popular content. It pulls up a page that is a lot like browsing a table at a bookstore, with the intention that visitors to RandomHouse.com should be able to discover new books and pin directly from the site to save to a Pinterest board.

In a press release, Christine McNamara, Vice President and Director of Partnerships at Random House said, “Random House is thrilled to partner with Pinterest and showcase what’s trending on our websites from their community of tens of millions of users, many of whom are avid readers and book lovers. Pinterest’s ongoing innovations in online discovery and community make them an important and desirable partner for our authors and we look forward to continuing to work closely with them on future endeavors.”

And in a statement to Publishing Perspectives, McNamara added that:

“Since introducing this unique visual approach to discovery on the Random House site, we’ve received a positive response from readers and have seen an increase of followers on Pinterest. It’s also been interesting to see a high number of backlist titles surface on the site. This week we plan to add similar Pinterest integration to TasteBook, our food and recipe community, which will allow visitors to discover most pinned recipes. We look forward to experimenting with ways to integrate Pinterest discovery throughout additional Random House sites.

We’re actively working on finding new ways for people to discover our books and the data from Pinterest has provided us another means to do so – taking consumer data and using it to fuel book discovery. Being able to source the Pinterest community means we can surface what real people are excited about in real time, bringing new dimension to the dialog about books on the web.”