Aug
11
Crunching Books
August 11, 2011 | 1 Comment
Thank you to Miral Sattar for this post describing her brilliant digital publishing platform BiblioCrunch. Not only does BiblioCrunch have a cool name, but the company is doing truly innovative work in the e-book field. The company offers a streamlined avenue for authors of all types to publish everywhere with literally one click. You can’t beat that. (In this post Miral uses a word that I have never heard of before: bookazines. I like it. I want to write one and I want to read one! Shall we assume it’s a hybrid of book and magazine? Read some insight here.)
The motivation behind BiblioCrunch.com
by Miral Sattar
BiblioCrunch.com is a digital platform that empowers writers and publishers to create and market their own digital books and bookazines. Through our easy-to-use publishing platform, anyone – bloggers, authors, students, writers, journalists, publishers – can share their stories.
THE IDEA
I came up with the idea for BiblioCrunch.com while conducting research for my thesis at NYU and working at TIME.com. I was looking for ways to diversify revenue streams for digital and print media and found that there was a void in the e-publishing space for digital books and bookazines that smaller companies like BiblioCrunch.com can fill. For example, we provide a one-click publishing solution where authors and publishers can write once and publish everywhere. E-books are one of the only products in digital media where readers are actually paying for content, and surprisingly, according to a Pew Research study that just came out, the eReader market growth is currently outpacing the tablet market.
It normally takes several steps to publish and package content into e-books and bookazines, as there are different formats for different devices. BiblioCrunch solves the conversion, distribution, and marketing problem that writers and content owners face. We hold to the “write once, publish anywhere” philosophy to make it easy for people to share and distribute their stories.
WE DO IT BETTER
At BiblioCrunch.com, we recognize that successful books require good content, superior editing, strong marketing, a well-designed and eye-catching cover, and an interested audience. So we socialized the interaction between readers, bloggers, authors, students, writers, journalists, publishers, and created a community where they can connect with one another to write and publish the best possible e-books. For example, you can hire a skilled designer or editor for your e-book directly through our online community.
We also recognize the importance of social reading. Any BiblioCrunch user can create a book club for a specific author, genre, publisher, or topic. Additionally, our books are easy to review and share via social media. We’re working on incorporating fun social elements into our platform and signing on more publishers. We’ve already signed OR Books and we’re in talks with more digital publications as well.
During my meetings with publishers, I realized that organizations are willing to experiment with the digital market if it’s easy for them to do. So we made signing up for BiblioCrunch.com as easy as possible. Writers and publishers can set up an account and start creating their e-books quickly and easily.
Check out an example here:
Members also have personal profile pages that they can send around to friends with their custom bookshelves, which show all the books they’ve written and added to their bookshelves.
GOING FORWARD
BiblioCrunch.com is a start-up in an exciting and up-and-coming space. We’ve made it simple to change our strategy quickly based on what find out works and what doesn’t. We’re hoping that more publishing companies will find ways to experiment with the digital space we’ve created. With our crowdsourcing model and community our publishers, authors, editors, designers, and readers will determine how the next generation of publishing will be shaped. By giving our platform community members our easy-to-use tools we empower them to experiment in this space. The future of the book industry depends on experimentation and finding new business models.
Miral Sattar loves new media, and has worked in the media industry for 10 years. Her mission is to innovate the publishing industry with technology using Bibliocrunch.com. Ms. Sattar has written for a variety of publications including TIME, Jane, and Metro NY. She has a MS in Publishing (Digital + Print Media) from NYU and a BS from Columbia University in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
You can follow her on Twitter @bibliocrunch.
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[...] other news, our compatriots in bookish blogging are prolific right now. We’ve posted about the amazing tool for authors called Bibliocrunch, and our friends over at Writerscast have a new interview in their Publishing Talks section with [...]