Montreal Tech Watch

BookOven, a startup by fellow Montréalers Hugh McGuire and Stéphanie Troeth, under development for the past year, launched an alpha version last week, with one simple feature showcase. It allows anyone to edit excerpts of an author’s work, also called by BookOven bite-sized edits.

It’s usually a short sentence, presented in the work’s context, and the user is given the opportunity to submit an improved edit. As soon as this is finished, another edit is presented to the user.

I find the mechanics used by BookOven to be similar to HotOrNot, where the visitor gets a few seconds to submit his/her thoughts to the system, which would then give a crowdsourced feedback to a user-submitted picture. Obviously, BookOven works also along the same line as Librivox or Wikipedia. Those online destinations bet on building a fanatical user base bringing user-generated content, rivaling quickly with more established entities in results quality. Wikipedia is free though (as in free beer and Free Software), so it would be interesting to see how users would see themselves contributing to a commercial work.

As the BookOven blog suggests, this is only one of the final product’s feature, which would ultimately give the opportunity to anyone to submit their litterary work, and publish it on BookOven.

I wouldn’t dare to comment if BookOven would actually revolutionize the book publishing industry or not. It’s of course a compelling alternative to traditional publishers. But the service would also need to be able to gather readers to make it interesting to its customers. I couldn’t also get myself to continue to use the service; the service obviously caters to writers, and also the Wikipedia/Librivox contributors work, none of which I never participated in. If you fit that description, I invite you though to try out the service. It has a wonderful user interface, as well as a dedicated team which am sure would love to answer to your feedback.

BookOven is funded by MontrealStartup and is based in the “no-name” shared startup space