by Luigi Galluccio - Politecnico di Torino

Have you ever needed to share your opinion or talk about what you prefer about a book with a large number of people? You have to go to www.bookliners.com!

Launched in 2010, Bookliners is a complete digital environment where users can read, underline, add notes and share them with other people, creating virtual reading groups. Books are not necessarily to be downloaded, they can be made accessible online and offline inside the environment itself.

After registration users enter a social environment in which they may:

• find other readers by affinity;
• discover new books based on suggestions;
• access free samples of the various available books;
• find free contents (copyleft or made available by publishers);
• buy contents;
• read, annotate, link, share comments with virtual reading groups;
• receive updates, invitation to events, latest news from authors and publishers.

Regarding publishers, Bookliners offers a dedicated access and specific tools to use if they want to create their own community using the Bookliners platform.

Every user who unlock one book from a publisher become a member of the publisher community, which can be drilled down and analyzed to better understand readers behaviors in order for example to communicate specific contents to the right cluster of users (i.e. offer a special discount to readers who bought or read a group of contents in a specific period, release a preview of the new book an author to anyone who did buy all the previous book of the same author).

In deep, Bookliners environment has three main key assets:

1. Social reading tools.
2. Streaming of editorial contents and possibility to share user’s generated content.
3. Possibility of tracing readers behaviours for specific purposes.

The core aspects are the Social reading tools that allow to a book to become a virtual place where readers can meet and discuss about and on content. Web 2.0 already gave some clear data on how relevant the cooperation between users can be and original contents, and if the content is the result of an author work, it can be a better educational base by keeping its original form.

Interacting by underlining and adding notes allows readers to enrich the book by adding links, video, audio, comments and in the meantime to keep the original form of the content.

In the Bookliners environment books are not downloaded, they are streamed. This concept pushes to redefine the commercial approach to the selling of editorial contents. Streaming books makes it possible to take inspiration from what succeeded in other markets, for example: since international music market collapsed after the passage to digital contents, two main concepts became new solutions: selling a single song at a very low price and giving full access to almost unlimited contents for a subscription fee. Spotify succeeded in making more than 5.000.000 users spend 120 USD per year while the highest spending in CD was 60 USD...In this direction, the "all you can read" concept becomes an attractive chance to fight against illegal download and trying to enlarge the user base: readers.

Streaming editorial contents makes it also possible to imagine to let readers try a part of the content before buying a book.

Readers may pay for a single page, an article or a small amount of pages.

Another solution could be to go for a first free step with advertising between pages that pays for the cost of the book and the possibility to get read of it by paying a monthly fee or other similar solutions.

Instead of using unsafe and complicated DRM, streaming contents lets digital lending easy and highly customizable.

Books may be lent from a Library for a determined period of time to a specific user: at the end of that period the content will be simply disabled for that account.

The third and final key asset is dealing with the managing of user accounts. The platform may register which user and when the user accessed to a single page. This feature may be useful to understand better readers engagement and behaviours, but it can also be used in the learning process, especially for use in professional contests.

Bookliners represents a new way for reading online because it is wisely able to take advantage of the new technologies as a digital platform can offer: digital, social and with a new business model applied to books but very profitable in other industries like music.

So what are you waiting for? Subscribe a new account on Bookliners, share, underline and after come here to comment what do you think about!