From The Local:
… Johanna and Pascal Denize, a pair of venture capitalists with a long history of start ups in the world of book publishing, founded Platify, a digital reading solution that they hope will transform the book market in the same way that Spotify has managed in the music industry.
”Book publishers have been slow in changing their work practices and business models to suit the new environment,” says Pascal Denize.
”We figured that by using what we have learned in our many years in the business, with the best software solution there is a chance of cornering a market.”
The pair hooked up with software developer Henrik Hussfelt and Platify was born.
Put simply, Platify’s role is to sit between the publishers and the tablets, and manage the purchase and subscription services of books online.
”We are not the first to realise the potential of this, but you have to have the best technological solution. Ours differs from others in several ways, most notably that you can bookmark pages, so if you are in the middle of a book it is easy to go back to the last point you were reading,” Denize explains. …
For the moment Platify has started with academic books in the United States, where one third of the global book market is based.
”The choice of market is an obvious one, because you have a homogeneous population of over 300 million, all speaking the same language. This makes our launch market choice easy, but as we grow we will branch out,” says Denize.
The trio tested tested the platform live last month on their own free service Litfy.
The site, which is primarily aimed at students, contains about 2,000 titles for which the copyright has expired.
Once they can test the success of the project, they can branch out and offer publishers as well as both published and new, unpublished authors a sales platform for their work.
