Reading 2.0: Three Alums Who Are Revolutionizing How We Read
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Start-ups launched by Haverford grads are using digital technology to expand the ways people choose what they read and how they read it.
Curling up with a good book isn’t the same anymore. It used to be that you’d leisurely peruse the offerings at your local bookstore, choose a tome that looked intriguing, and crack it open, hoping to get lost within its pages. Now, you’re just as likely to go online, select whatever book Amazon recommends for you, and then swipe through the pages on your digital tablet, the glow of the screen illuminating every word.
Some say these changes are a bad thing. But digital doesn’t necessarily spell doom for the world of words. As a trio of new start-ups launched by Haverford grads makes clear, technology is also transforming the act of reading in beneficial ways, leading to exciting new opportunities for authors, book lovers, and word nerds alike. Yes, reading might never be the same—but that might be good.
Breaking All the Rules
Math major Andrew Lipstein ’10 didn’t think much about reading in college. It was only after he graduated and started working for various ad agencies in New York City and Florida that he started reading books like Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and James Salter’s Light Years and something inside him clicked. “It fundamentally changed me,” he says about his newfound connection to reading. “For me, there’s nothing comparable. Nothing provides a better escape. Nothing challenges me as much.”
That’s why, when a friend of his was attempting to publish her novel in the spring of 2014, he decided to launch his own literary press to help her. He soon discovered the industry was in disarray. With publishers big and small floundering and hardcover sales dwindling, book advances were decreasing, royalties were shrinking, and there were fewer resources available to find, groom, and promote new literary talent.
So that June, Lipstein launched 0s&1s Reads, his e-book publishing company, featuring his friend’s novel, a few other original works, and some handpicked selections from other small publishers. With the launch, he decided to break all the rules, selling the digital-only books directly through his website. Removing Amazon from the equation meant cutting out the chunk of digital revenue the e-retailer collected on each book sold through its site. It also meant Lipstein could sell his books free of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) encryption technologies that are designed to deter theft but that also make it difficult for e-books to be moved from one reading device to another.
0s&1s Reads was unorthodox in another way: Authors and outside publishers received 80 percent of the profits on all books sold, most of which go for $6. That was a major step up from the 8 percent to 15 percent royalties authors usually receive. Then, this past June, Lipstein made another crazy move: He started giving authors and publishers 100 percent of all sales. “That came from changing the context of how I wanted to sell the books,” he says. “It’s free for me to sell somebody one of these books. The fact that authors and publishers let me sell their books, I can look at that not as me doing them a service, but them giving me content.” Instead, he now takes on sponsors for the site.
The model seems to be working. There are now approximately 130 fiction and non-fiction books for sale on 0s&1s Reads, plus poetry collections and digital editions of literary magazines—in total, he’s showcasing the work of 100-plus small publishers. The site is also packed with engaging free content like author interviews and “blind-date” discussions between writers. Meanwhile, with six sponsors and counting, Lipstein is turning a profit. Maybe most important, 0s&1s Reads has given its creator an injection of optimism about the future of book publishing. “The output these days is so far-reaching, and genres are being explored so much more than they were five years ago,” he says. “If you are a reader, it has never been a more interesting time.”
Speed-Dating for Books
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At first, Peter Kay ’88 wasn’t sure what he thought about the fact that his app, ncvrs (pronounced “encovers”), was described as the “Tinder for books” when it launched last November. But the comparison to the online dating site worked. After all, he says, “Matching romantic partners is not too far off from matching people with books.”
As the former vice president of digital media at W.W. Norton, Kay had witnessed a shift in the book-discovery process. These days, recommendation sites like Goodreads point you to books based on other titles you like, and Amazon recommends books based largely on your buying history. While these services can provide you with options that fit your taste profile, they remove the possibility of discovering a gem. “If people’s next book is always going to be chosen by the laser-focused Amazon algorithm, there would never be those great surprising books anymore,” he says.
Kay wanted to bring back those surprises and, thanks to his own run-in with serendipity, he had the capital to do so. In 1997, on a whim, he bought the domain name Twitch.com. Only later did Twitch become synonymous with Twitch.TV, a video streaming platform focused on video games that Amazon purchased in 2014 for $970 million. That meant Twitch.com suddenly had a lot of value, as Kay discovered when he sold the domain a few months later. “It wasn’t enough to buy a private island, but it was enough to quit my day job and start this company,” he says.
Ncvrs, the company Kay started, developed a simple yet compelling free app for Apple and Android devices: The program shows you a series of book covers one after another. If a book looks intriguing, you swipe right. If not, you swipe left. You get more info on each book by swiping down, and if you know you want to read a particular book, you swipe up, adding it to your “To read” list. At first, the books presented are old standbys, like Catcher in the Rye and the Harry Potter series, but soon the program displays increasingly obscure works from a catalog that’s 100,000 titles and growing. The books are in part determined by your previous likes and dislikes, but ncvrs, also regularly throws in curveballs—works that don’t fit into any pattern, but that you might love just the same.
“It’s a very gentle algorithm,” says Kay. “It’s like you’re walking through the Strand Book Store [in New York], and the books you like move toward you and books you don’t like move away from you. But we keep in surprises, too.”
In the future, Kay aims to generate income from in-app alerts from publishers who want to market books to ncvrs users based on their reading history. And he plans to eventually sell user data he’s collected to publishers and marketers—such as his discovery that people who hate Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged tend to love Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. But he’s also just excited that he’s helping preserve one of his favorite aspects of book buying. “I think there is a place for the pleasure of walking into a place and just looking around,” he says. “I think the act of discovery is just as exciting as the discovery itself.”
Coloring Within the Lines
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The concept for BeeLine Reader, a browser plug-in and web app that makes reading faster and easier, came from an introductory college psychology class, says Andrew Cantino ’05, the company’s chief technology officer. Nick Lum, Cantino’s second cousin and company co- founder, was attending Swarthmore at the same time Cantino was at Haverford, and during a psych course he learned about the Stroop effect, the finding that if you have a series of words like “red,” “blue,” and “green” printed in different colors, it’s much harder to name the color of the words if the print color doesn’t match the color denoted by the word.
“Nick’s idea was that we can use color to help you in some way, instead of using it to mess you up,” says Cantino.
That’s the idea behind BeeLine Reader, which colors lines of text in browsers and mobile devices with different hues. (The plug-in and app are free for limited use and are low-cost for more avid readers, there is also a version for PDFs.) The color gradient is always the same from the end of one line to the start of the next. This helps the brain avoid making what are called “line transition errors,” skipping or repeating lines, which happens fairly frequently and slows down reading, especially if you’re tired or reading on small screens, such as reading a book on your e-reader before you go to bed.
BeeLine Reader, which launched in 2013, has proved especially beneficial to those with dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, and reading disabilities, in some cases increasing reading speeds over 50 percent. “This is literally the most useful and beneficial thing that could ever come into my life,” reads one of the tweets the company has received. But through online tests, the company has found that even skilled readers can use the program to increase their reading speed by about 20 percent, enough to read another book each year. “It can be really life-changing,” says Cantino.
BeeLine Reader has won prizes from the likes of Dell, Stanford University, and the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, and its browser plug-in is being installed in computers throughout the California Public Library System. Although the iPad app offers the ability to read Kindle books with BeeLine Reader, one goal the start-up has yet to achieve is to launch an app for color Kindle devices with Amazon’s blessing. But with its browser extension now claiming a passionate legion of 50,000 users from 120 countries, Cantino is confident that this objective is within the company’s grasp. As he puts it, “Our fans are loud, and they are happy to send letters to Amazon.”