Start-Up of the Week: BookGlutton
Dec 8th, 2008 by admin
The affects of the Internet have been felt everywhere – from the way we listen to music and order food, to where we get our news and shop for shoes. It’s an amazing phenomenon! The digital highway has also had a profound impact on the publishing industry and not such a great one. Books sales continue to plummet. According to literature professor Nick Mount with the University of Toronto, “Paired with the invention of the photocopier, this technology [the Internet] has really been wreaking havoc on books everywhere”. Is there a silver lining? You bet. It’s called BookGlutton, our unique Start-up of the Week, a site that combines the glam of social networking with the age-old love that people have for books. Here’s more from BookGlutton’s founder Travis Alber:
Please tell us about your start-up BookGlutton. What makes it unique?
TA: BookGlutton is a cross between a book, a community and a computer. The Web site is unique because it lets people talk about books while they’re in the moment, much like you would in real life. At BookGlutton you can open a book and read it alone, or you can invite your friends to join you inside the book itself. If your friends are online at the same time you can discuss the book on a chapter-by-chapter basis (which keeps you from finding out how the book ends). You can also leave a note attached to any paragraph for others to respond to later. BookGlutton is something that doesn’t really exist in the paper world - we provide instant community and links to information. We call it social reading.
Since the entire process is Web-based and cross platform, it doesn’t require you to download any software, and most public domain books are free. The catalog has about 1,200 books, but writers can also upload their own work to discuss.
Who are your target users? How do you make money with a business such as this?
TA: We target the reading community at large - BookGlutton is open to anyone with a Web connection and a penchant for reading. However, we do tend to skew younger, 18-45 years old, since we focus on social networking.
Users include individuals who want an attractive reading experience online - something more sophisticated than scrolling through a long PDF, and many of those people invite friends. We also get communities that exist in the offline world: schools, book clubs and writing groups.
We’d like to be the iTunes of eBooks; so our primary goal is to sell access to the books themselves. We will also have a suite of paid features that subscribers can access - although the standard Reader will always be free. Finally, there are advertisements on some pages of the site.
What has been the most challenging aspect of launching this business?
TA: The technical and interface challenges were the hardest. Technically we are pushing the envelope on what’s been done with long-format text and there were a lot of programming issues in the areas of chat and shared annotations. There were also a number of unique challenges with interface design. An interesting example involves page numbers. When someone makes the text larger in BookGlutton’s Unbound Reader, it re-flows onto additional pages. We had to come up with a different way to tell people where they are in a book, since the page numbers change according to screen and font size. The level of social interaction is another challenging example - we had to find a happy medium between reading with a community and reading alone. It’s important that people be able to close out the community when they need to, so we designed the community aspects to “close” for privacy.
Did you write a business plan? How did you fund the launch of your business? Are you currently seeking investment?
TA: We spent about a month working on the business plan - researching the market and coming up with some initial projections. My business partner and I funded it ourselves - with our savings. Since we both know how to do a lot of the work we were able to pull it off, and we knew we needed to decide between spending our time looking for cash or just start doing the work - so the work won out.
Is this your first start-up venture?
TA: Yes. I was in San Francisco during the last tech boom so I worked at a number of start-ups. That experience gave me a feel for how a cash-strapped start-up operates but his is the first one I’ve run.
What advice can you give others looking to start their own businesses?
TA: If you are confident your idea will work stick to it for at least a year. There are a lot of people who will tell you not to try it. You need to trust your instinct.
If you had to start all over again, what are some things you would do differently?
TA: I would iterate faster. Doing this would probably mean we’d need more money at an earlier stage, though.
