Peter Hudson recalls one consistent message ringing out from his company’s users during its early days: “This is a great idea, but you don’t have enough content.”
A year and a half ago, the Vancouver-based ebook provider formerly known as BitLit offered fewer than 20,000 titles in its catalogue. It’s now up to 250,000.
And as of Monday (December 14), Shelfie is venturing into the realm of audiobooks in a move Hudson hopes will open up even more avenues for content.
Shelfie has partnered with big-name publishers like HarperCollins, Hachette and Blackstone to offer 20,000 audiobooks that can be delivered to its customers through the Findaway digital service.
“You don’t make an audiobook for a book that wasn’t a best-seller, so 20,000 audio books actually punches a lot above its weight,” Hudson told Business In Vancouver.
The Shelfie mobile app allows users to take photos of their stacked bookshelves to see if any print copies they own are available to be bundled with a discounted ebook.
If the book is eligible, users write his or her name inside the physical book’s copyright page and then take a photo using a smartphone. The Shelfie app then verifies the authenticity so readers don’t need to produce a receipt to retroactively bundle their physical book and ebook.
The big difference between what the company was doing with ebooks and what it’s now doing with audiobooks is that the latter represents an entirely different product, Hudson said.
“An ebook is just the text on a different screen vs. paper,” he said.
“You can read an audiobook when you’re driving or you’re out for a run but you can’t do that with an ebook, so it’s a big expansion for us.”
Hudson said one of the biggest challenges his company had as a startup was forging partnerships to get the content people wanted to bundle.
“And with ebooks that was hard because a lot of publishers are pretty conservative because of what Amazon had done in the ebook market around being aggressive on pricing,” he said.
“From a conceptual standpoint, audio books are just digital files the same way ebooks are digital files. The legal stuff surrounding them is not quite as hot a topic, so publishers have been a little more experimental.”
