Serendipite Studios of Mount Pleasant is one of twelve new companies in the United States selected as a finalist for the O’Reilly Publishing Startup Showcase. The competition is part of O’Reilly’s Tools of Change Publishing Conference in New York City on February 13 -15, 2012.
Frustrated with current economic models in publishing, Founder and CEO Kathy Meis started Serendipite Studios about a year ago with a mission to protect quality literature and journalism. In late December 2011, the company introduced Pappus, a revolutionary book discovery tool that enables authors and publishers to blog directly from their books and reach their readers in seconds.
“Digital books are technically giant web pages. You can do amazing things with them,” says Meis. “Our goal is to help authors and publishers engage with readers from within their books without interrupting the reading experience.” A writer herself, Meis spent a year studying the problems facing authors and readers. The biggest problem she found was discovery.
“It’s difficult to imagine,” Meis says, “but at a recent conference, attendees were told ‘there were more books published this week than there were in all of 1950.’ So think of 2012 as introducing the equivalent of 52 years’ worth of new books. That’s a very crowded marketplace! Yet stores where readers discover new books are closing at an alarming rate. We decided it was important to put book discovery in the hands of writers and publishers. We wanted to empower them with a tool that could recreate the bookstore browsing experience online while making it less time consuming for them to reach out and engage with readers. With Pappus, authors can now blog directly from their digital books and reach their readers in seconds. We also built in metrics so they can learn what’s resonating. We’re excited to see authors experiment and grow their audiences using Pappus, and we’re thrilled to be part of the O’Reilly competition in February.”
You can tour Pappus by clicking http://serendipitestudios.com/introducing-pappus/
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Wpow, Kathy. Congratulations.