Jennifer Poulter and I have been emailing back and forth about this and that for the last couple days, New Years calibrations clearly being events that barely slow either of us down from working. Jennifer is one of the people we've met over at JacketFlap who has turned into one of our biggest evangelists and go-getters. She is an absolute powerhouse, and we love her to bits! During our email discussions the question of how many books can Sharing Books handle on its site came up. Jennifer ( an just about everyone we talk to ) has also had much to say about quality control, but I will save that discussion for another time!

In terms of content we don't mind having a lot of stuff on the site. In fact, that is exactly what we do want. Space is not an issue, bandwidth and storage space are cheap. Without having to go to a new server package we can easily support 50-100 submissions a day on the site, up to a total of about 10,000 books, before we start to have a serious problem and ask for more server from our host. They can scale up to full enterprise size, and we would be delighted to have that problem to deal with.

The risk to us is so minimal, we can basically host 100,000 books on our site for dirt cheap, distributing them digitally and with print on demand features, and that cost is dropping in half every 18 months. The opposite is happening to traditional publishers. Every 18 months the costs of maintaining a highly vertical corporate structure, distribution network, and sales channel network, and cost of printing goes UP every 18 months ( by about 10% ). So, basically, if we get inundated, we would be absolutely ecstatic. Content is king online, and that is the exact wave of interest and activity that we want. That lets us get more advertising, charge more for sponsorships, and in turn give more back to our authors. If we were getting 100 books a week submitted, knowing that of those 100 only 5 are going to be moderately successful for a short period, and 1 is going to be very successful for a long time, we would be happy. That level of traffic and interest in our site would mean those six successful books would be getting a -LOT- of money. The more content, the more traffic, the more money we have to share.

Once we get to a critical mass of content, we'll add in more tools to let people discover and share books. Letting people build and share their library of favorite books with all their friends. Letting authors set up channels that people can subscribe to, so they can send out notices to all their fans when a new book is uploaded, or when a book gets changed. At that point we would also look into more collaboration and communication tools, letting authors connect with each other so they can edit books, and help improve each other's work. It is our sincere hope that we get absolutely SWAMPED with books. Our business success depends on it.

Happy New Year to everyone, here's hoping for a blast of a year in 2009, and here is hoping to us getting absolutely SWAMPED with book submissions! Also if anyone is interested in finding out more about WHERE Sharing Books is hosted, post a comment here and I will contact you directly and hook you up with some info and a sales rep at our host.

Labels: business philosophy, content