Monday, December 5, 2011

Why is it called the bookbook fund?

A couple of months ago I had a business idea. I noticed that lots of successful companies were effectively bare bones publishers for other people's content: Blogger is a publisher of people's brief writing, Youtube is a publisher of videos, Twitter is a publisher of brief thoughts, and Facebook is a publisher of all these things.

I had an extra coffee that morning so I was daydreaming at my desk about becoming a wealthy and influential person. I thought there was a giant gap in the market for bare bones ebook publishing.

My idea was a website that allowed you to upload a text file, have it converted to an ebook, and share it with everyone. If you wanted to charge for it (maybe you were sharing your university notes with the class but wanted $5 per copy, or maybe you just wrote a book that you wanted to self-publish), the website publisher would take a % of the sale price.

I came up with the name bookbook - it's like facebook but for books, so call it bookbook. It's catchy. I talked to my brother and my friend about it at lunch and they both thought it was a pretty good idea. I went back to work and spent the rest of the day thinking about the TED talk I'd probably end up giving.

When I get home, I googled "ebook publisher" and noticed there were about 10 professional looking sites that already did the same thing. So I scrapped the idea.

Then when I decided I could invest in underpriced equities and make good long term returns, I realised that bookbook was more than a business idea five years too late - it was also a cool name. So we're using that name.


No comments:

Post a Comment