Ideas for the project

[Kevin Palmer]

When I read "Pandora for books" on Mashable.com I thought I would be able to read books. Just getting recommendations is nothing new. Amazon does that. The graphs don't really separate it enough. Amazon also lets you read samples of most books. They also show reviews and of course, allow you to make purchases. I would say that you need to be able to read full books to differentiate yourself. That would be mean monetizing and paying publishers/authors through other means. Just don't put ads into the books, between pages, etc. That will totally interrupt the cadence of reading.

What if you became a launching platform for new authors. People could read entire books by new authors on your site or purchase them for offline viewing. Then you could also make recommendations for published authors based on each users reading history.

Once you get the company direction I would turn my focus to the interface and UI. Right now it's lacking but I realize you are probably strapped for cash and none of the founders are probably designers.

Best of luck!

[Daniel Bowen]

Hi Kevin!  beta.booklamp.org/reader is a 2 year old demonstration.  The project has come a long way since then, and we have not found the need to update the demo by any means.

That said, the demo is about as out of date as windows 95

Keep in touch,
Dan

PS I'm a mac guy