Five Questions with SharedBook.

I have mentioned the reverse publishing program of SharedBook a few times and with this mornings announcement of new partnership deals with Jump TV and YAVarsity.com, I thought it a perfect opportunity to speak to Caroline Vanderlip CEO of SharedBook.com.

From the current press release:

SharedBook Inc., the Reverse Publishing Platform provider, is currently developing solutions with JumpTV Inc. (through its JumpTV Sports division which incompasses the recently acquired XOS Network) and YAVarsity.com, that will give sports participants and their fans a one-click way to create personalized season record books from existing online content such as game scores, message board comments, and photographs. SharedBook introduced a similar book product with Sportography, Inc. earlier this year

I sat down (virtually) with Caroline last week and asked her five questions:

1. How did SharedBook get started?
   
   SharedBook was founded by Josef “Yossie” Hollander, a successful serial software entrepreneur, in Herzlia, Israel in April 2002. Yossie originally envisioned making e-books interactive through annotation and collaboration technologies that would give individuals a reason to read online. Two years later, Yossie’s pre-teen daughter wanted to create a book on Britney Spears with her friends. We realized that we could adapt what had already been created for e-books. This way, Yossie’s daughter and others would be able to use technology to enhance their creativity, and it would be fun. In early 2006, the core of that technology was adapted and brought to market to enable book making. By the end of the year, we added third party integration to simplify the process.
   
   We launched our first data integration project with Legacy.com in November 2006. Soon after, we published a suite of APIs to enable any third party – business or consumer – to integrate data into SharedBook’s Reverse Publishing Platform for on-demand output by their users. As a result, our developers were able to use the API to build a working sample of what became our Blog2Print blog printing widget in just a few days.
   
   We have since launched data integration projects with CarePages.com and Sportography.com, and plan to introduce three additional new products by the end of this month in different categories.
   
   
2. You provide a publisher platform for publishers but you tend to operate outside the traditional publishing environment (or model). How do you describe your market? How large is your market and do you see yourselves competing with the Blurb.com and mypublisher.com type platforms or is your offering different?
   
   SharedBook is a technology company that is based on a brand-centric, software as a service (SaaS) model. We white label our products through the partners we work with such as CarePages.com, Legacy.com, Regent Seven Seas Cruises, and others. To the end user, they are purchasing Brand X product, powered by SharedBook.
   Anyone can integrate data into SharedBook’s Reverse Publishing Platform for on-demand output by their users. This information might include branded content, statistical information or user-generated content, We are not limited or focused on one particular market, although we have identified several industries that we believe offer the greatest opportunities.
   
   Hewlett Packard recently estimated that 53 trillion digital pages will be printed in 2010. With SharedBook’s Web to print technology, we expect to garner a significant share of the estimated $296 billion opportunity.
   
   SharedBook is focused on automating and simplifying the book making process as much as possible. With just one click, our Reverse Publishing Platform maps multiple streams of data into a structured book product that can be purchased immediately, or personalized further. Users can then edit the content, add to it and invite others to contribute additional information if they choose. HTML formatting can be difficult to work with, and we are not aware of another company that is automating the book making process in this way.
   
   We do not consider Blurb or MyPublisher to be direct competitors since they are both primarily direct to consumer companies. Another key difference is that SharedBook offers a browser-based application, rather than a software plug-in. There is nothing to download and you can work on a book from any computer as long as there is an Internet connection. In addition, Blurb and MyPublisher both offer products that tend to be more photo-oriented. At SharedBook, formatting of text and other content gets feature billing, along with photos.
   
   
3. Are you content to play in this market or do you see expansion opportunities into the traditional publisher marketplace? If so, what are the key aspects of your offering?
   
   We believe opportunities exist in both the book publishing and magazine publishing markets to give customers the ability to select and choose the online content that is most relevant to them. For book publishers, that could mean giving users the ability to select specific chapters to print, or even an entire book with a custom dedication. For magazine publishers, it could mean giving readers the ability to select all of the content they want on a single topic, or to pick and choose the content they want from multiple magazine titles across a publishing group, and then personalize the end product further.
   
   In addition to automating the book making process, SharedBook also offers patent-pending annotation technology, which gives users the ability to comment contextually, and in real-time with other users, on any text contained in the application. We believe this could be useful for books in progress or online book clubs, as well as in educational environments. You can see an example of how the annotation technology works on PeoplesAnnotated.com, where The Constitutional Amendments and Genesis, the first book of the Bible, are posted as examples.
   
   
4. The company has been around for a while, but your professional experience is outside the publishing world, what surprises you about this industry?
   
   Change is hard for any industry to understand but we are in the midst of a cataclysmic change in the way people consume content. Technology has given us tools to make reading and exchanging of ideas much richer and yet most traditional publishers are not experimenting enough with these tools. We’re still just figuring out how people want to use and manipulate content, as well as what they are willing to pay for. Publishers need to experiment more with the digital environment, to leverage it to their advantage, and to embrace these changes faster.
   
   
5. What is next for SharedBook?
   
   A lot! We have had a busy summer and it looks like the momentum is going to carry us right through the end of the year. As I mentioned, we will be launching three new solutions by the end of this month in different categories. Several other clients are in the development phase, many of which are working with our API, which has simplified the development process significantly. We’ll be announcing projects in the e-commerce, college sports, travel and yearbook industries by the end of the year, and possibly a few others.