What the world needs now is….
- An aggregator of a book lover’s print and digital bookshelves?
- “The YouTube of storytelling”?
- A curated marketplace for publishing professionals?
You tell us in #FutureChat today.
Those are some of the FutureBook BookTech Awards that journalist Molly Flatt has been profiling for weeks here at The FutureBook.
On 4th December at London’s Mermaid, they’ll be at our FutureBook 2015 Conference (and we hope you will be, too), vying for the inaugural prize named for what they do, and you can hash it #BookTech: they bring something about tech to bear on something about books.
Perhaps it’s safer to say it that way than to use that tired cliché about about “the intersection of books and tech,” because that’s a streetcorner on which an awful lot of companies get run over. Don’t believe me? Rest your eyes on the eight-page single-spaced Google Doc on which Canelo’s Michael Bhaskar has kept a running list of publishing-related startups. Indeed, most of the outfits we’re talking about today aren’t on the list, they’re that new to the party.
Flatt has written well to the purpose of the BookTech Award’s development, and it’s hardly just to make a nice new company’s folks feel good. She writes:
Our long-term aim for BookTech is to give publishing professionals a head start on disruption coming their way, whilst also hopefully inspiring them to take some bold imaginative leaps of their own, it represents an encouraging start.
Our current gang of eight (there are two more to come in Flatt’s profile series) does include at least one old-timer. Reedsy is in the class now that I like to call (and no one else does) a “done started up.” Maybe I’m just jealous that publishing startups are allowed to keep “starting up,” somehow, while the rest of us aren’t granted such extended youth. When do they cross the line into some sort of corporate adulthood? A year? Two years?
Some of the most interesting features of many of these incorporated dreams, of course, have to do with their finances. For example, Gojimo—which Flatt profiles for us this week—has attracted more than $1 million in seed money and is rated 4.5 in the App Store by more than 1,000 students who presumably are using it to prep for exams. And yet, Gojimo founder George Burgess tells us, “Now that we’ve built a killer product that students love, the next, and hardest, problem for us to tackle is how we monetise.”
Isn’t that a remarkable thing? Something that big, that apparently successful, and it’s not monetised. Forget “will they come”? The question for these ventures is, “Even if you build it well, will they pay for it?”
Today in #FutureChat, Flatt will join us, as well as many of our BookTech contenders’ chief officers as can break away, to talk about what they’re doing. You can ask them questions and find out more about what they’re doing and why.
Here are the folks we anticipate joining us, and the Twitter handles they’ll use. (Normally we ask everyone to tweet as people, not they’re company names, in the chat, but with this many of our fine #BookTech chiefs running around, company handles will work just fine.)
- Johnny Bennett of ooovre: @ooovre
- Chris Smith of Write Track: @write_track
- Emmanuel Kolade of Shulph: @ekolade
- Emmanuel Nataf of Reedsy: @ReedsyHQ
- Michel Lawrence of The Owl Field: @owlfield
- Evan Jones of Together Tales: @togethertales
This link will take you to the whole group of stories on them, lots of interesting reading.
And in #FutureChat, you can even ask them: “What on Earth does your company’s name mean?”
This story was originally written as the walkup to our #FutureChat of 20th November 2015. Join us every Friday live on Twitter for #FutureChat at:
- 4:00 p.m. London (GMT)
- 5:00 p.m. Rome (CEST)
- 11:00 a.m. New York (ET)
- 10:00 a.m. Chicago (CT)
- 8:00 a.m. Los Angeles (PT)
What’s in a name? (What isn’t?)
When oolipo goes head-to-head with ooovre (yes, three o’s) and when Shulph gets shuffled in with Gojimo (which is not a fast-food sushi consortium), you have to wonder if the publishing startup we really need most today isn’t the one called HowToNameACompany.com. A name like Reedsy in a reading industry looks like a typo (it’s not, they swear that). The Owl Field has little to do with aviaries or birds. Let’s hope there’s some wisdom implied.
Fanciful, whimsical, often cutesy names have been the vogue for several years in publishing-startup monikers. I blame it all on Andrew Rhomberg, as the poor man knows, with Jellybooks. More seriously, I also worry that it suggests an industry that thinks of its audience as sentimentalist dimwits who see cat pictures as currency and literature as inextricably bound up with cupcakes. Are we really complimenting them when we ask them to “be a buzzer for Libboo”?
Outvoted long ago, of course, I watch as Porter’s Parade of Peculiarly Named Startups grows only longer. And especially in such a field littered by fallen logos (startups that are now brokedowns), I wonder if it might not make more sense to tell people what you are in your name?
There’s more: Read on
By Porter Anderson Follow @Porter_Anderson
The Bookseller: Which #BookTech player is your favourite?
Read the full post at: TheBookseller.com/FutureBook
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