After nearly a year of development, it’s time to raise the curtain on The Hawaii Project. Come on in — the water’s fine!
People are drowning in new books (Bowker says the number of books published is up nearly 500% since 2008, and that even excludes the indie books published with no ISBNs!). Some say “the glut is good”, but readers are left adrift on an ocean of new books trying to find the books that matter.
Yet, online book discovery is broken. The US book market is $15 BILLION and the most common discovery method is offline word of mouth. Broken.
Here’s why:
- People are busy. Nobody has time to search & browse for stuff.
- The ratings and review regime is corrupt & broken.
- Social Discovery is the wrong model — my friends don’t read what I read.
- There’s some great curators out there — but their taste and mine only sometimes align. And who has time to keep up with them all?
What if there was something that watched what the curators and influencers wrote about, then brought the relevant things to you? Kind of like Medium or Flipboard, but for books? A kind of Personalized Curation?
The Hawaii Project watches a curated slice of the books web, figuring out what the curators, influencers and tastemakers are writing about, and then matches it to the books, topics and authors you love — bringing you great books matching your interests. Great books to read, and a highly tailored news feed filled with interesting articles to read about books and subjects you’re interested in. The curation ensures the innate quality is high, the personalization ensures it’s relevant.
In the coming weeks we’ll be exploring this in more detail, but for now, the best news is: it’s available NOW. Just head over to http://www.thehawaiiproject.com and sign up. A basic account is free.
Reading and literacy are powerful forces for good. We started The Hawaii Project to share our love of books and to use entrepreneurship to create an engine to generate cold hard cash that we’ll share with deserving literacy non-profits. So the less fortunate of us can still grow to love books and learning. We generate revenue through our Premium Accounts, and 10% of our revenue goes to fund 3 great literacy non-profits.
Join us and Do Good by Reading Well.