My name is Pierre Lapointe and I am one of the founders of Sharing-Books.com. Although I am a businessman, I am a creative type just like our book creators. I invent business models and Sharing-Books.com is the most exciting one I have participated in by far. Here is our story:

Once upon a time…

Actually in early 2007, our friend Andrea Azevedo shared with us a brief children's book, called The Little Suitcase, written as a eulogy for a young friend, Dylan Oser, who had passed away due to a rare disease.  My wife, Bonnie, asked me to help Andrea get the story published as Andrea wanted the proceeds to go to Sunny Hill Health Centre.

To a technophile like me, traditional publishing was not an option. It is expensive and the margins are paper thin.  It had to be on the web.  As I researched how to get the maximum visibility for Andrea’s book, I found out that there were a lot of children's book creators hoping to be published. Many books had been lovingly crafted but had been abandoned because publishers rejected them.

I also learned that most children's book creators are purpose driven people. They want to share their creation first and money and fame are secondary motivators. In fact most related to the idea that Andrea wanted to give away all her profits. They felt the same way about causes they believe in. This revelation helped advance our thinking. What if we could provide a web venue where children's book creators could share their work and help charities at the same time? What if we could concentrate a lot of new children books in one site? I saw the need for a new web business model.

What if we created a “charitable” company?  We mean by that not a charity but a business that by design would really impact an important cause. We decided that our business model would split all revenues: 1/3 to a cause, 1/3 to the book creators and 1/3 to the company itself.  That’s not only one third of our profits but one third of our revenues!

My problem was which charity?  If I left it to every book creator to decide, we would need to vet thousands of charities – an impossible task.  Fortunately, the answer was provided when I attended a Vancouver Board of Trade presentation by John Wood, the founder of Room to Read.

John had just published Leaving Microsoft to Change the World.  I loved John’s candor and directness.  I loved the fact that he applied sound business practices to make Room to Read a high performance NGO (Non Governmental Organization).  At the end, John shared “I wish I had $50 million”. I felt emboldened to introduce myself and say “I think I have your $50 million.”

Room to Read’s purpose is to provide resources for literacy by building and equipping libraries (over 5,000 so far) as well as schools and computer labs, and by providing scholarships to young girls in the developing world. I shared my business plan with John and his leaders. With their business and technology backgrounds, John and his team responded enthusiastically to our idea.

So we had found a cause all children's book creators agree with: literacy.  But to be consistent with our purpose, we had to make our books freely accessible to all children and their parents.  This is why our creators make their books available for free so that all the children of the world can find new and original stories that keep them interested and help them acquire the life changing skill of reading.

Our business model was now ready to be transformed from idea to reality.  We assembled a skilled and motivated team, found investors and built this web site that you are visiting today.  This site is the core of our business model and allows us to operate with very low costs so that we can give 1/3 of our revenues to Room to Read, another 1/3 to our book creators and operate the company on the other 1/3.  Sharing Books is a unique business model serving a cause, a community of content creators and delivering high value to the site’s users.

Sharing-books.com revenues come from:

1. Donations, as books are made available on a shareware basis

2. Subscriptions to our No Logo Service™ that delivers the site free of ads

3. Sponsorships by corporations wanting to create good will with a well-targeted audience

4. Advertising, in a discrete and children appropriate way

5. Affiliates, this covers all kinds of programs like ordering a customized hard copy of one of our books or a shirt imprinted with a favourite character from a book

6. The discovery and market proofing of new characters for traditional publishing, or for the video game, movie or toy industries.

Thank you for your interest.

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