My chat with SharedBook execs

Yesterday I had the chance to speak with SharedBook CEO, Caroline Vanderlip and Ann Manby, VP Communications. We spoke about the services SharedBook provides and their new blog2print service which offers bloggers a revenue stream for users who may wish to print their content. Here are my notes:

• The SharedBook team is made up of 43 employees, 22 are located in Israel (mostly the development staff)
• Their revenue model is based on technology licensing and book publishing
• We reviewed their service on legacy.com (an obituary site) which has printed over 20k legacy books
• They offer a social networking option whereby a group can participate in commenting on a book – the example we looked at was the Bible. Each user can select a section to comment on and then the other members of the group can reply to their comments and/or add their own thoughts
• Their closest competitor is Qoop

We went through a demo of their new Blog2Print offering which currently only works on Google's Blogger service. In minutes you can add a widget to your blog which allows anyone to print a book (paperback or hard cover) of any posts you desire from the blog. Caroline said they are looking to roll it out to other blog software throughout the summer. If anyone prints a book from your blog, you earn a 20% rev share ($5 on a hard cover).

Both Caroline and Ann are excited about the Blog2Print offering and I may look into using it once it is available for Drupal. I think many popular bloggers will find a service like this beneficial as it would be nice to offer a "top posts" book for their readers.