This Startup is Making Reading Cool Again
By Maryam Labib.
Most startups advertise with catchy slogans and change-your-world promises. “Get through your day without lifting a finger,” or “love what you do and do what you love.”
Entrepreneurship is in, and the well-meaning push to motivate small businesses has led to a great number of startups making headlines. But there is one essential component that many of these startups are missing.
If you asked any startup why it was founded, the answer to this question usually ranges between “it makes something easier” and “it’s entertaining.” Bookselves is an up-and-coming startup can give both these answers truthfully, but there is also a third answer they can give, a justification we don’t always hear: “It makes the world a better place.”
Bookselves is a mobile app that connects people digitally so that they can browse books online and meet in-person to trade them. Reading books is — debatably — the greatest hobby in the world. There is no doubt about the benefits of reading. The value of having an educated and well-read society is immeasurable; however, we live in sad, book-less times.
Whereas reading books once distinguished those who were educated, exploratory, and great conversationalists, it now is a measure of one’s “nerdiness” or“geekiness,” regardless of whether one reads comic books or manuscripts with more pictures than words.
This is an unfortunate trend that has evolved in the past few decades, and has been subconsciously encouraged by startups that create apps, video games, and social media platforms with the simple aim to entertain people.
According to a 2012 study by the Department for Culture Media and Sport, 42 percent of men don’t read for pleasure. That’s almost one in every two men who never pick up a book in their free time. What happened to the loved heritage of reading? What are these men doing instead? Well, there are about 35 million of them on Tinder, to start. With every new popular app that hits the Apple or Android stores, there is a group of loyal customers that take up much of their time to be on the app.
Overall, the technological frenzy is feeding a mob of people that get their news sources from the same places, engage in the same games, watch the same Youtube videos, and take the same Buzzfeed quizzes, instead of reading classics like To Kill a Mockingbird or Pride and Prejudice.
Many prefer these instant gratification mechanisms for entertainment over, say, picking up a book on a lazy Sunday afternoon, because of the ability to be social with other people, the ease with which they can access said entertainment, and the measure of success or achievement.
What’s revolutionary about Bookselves is that it’s coming out with all the same perks, except that it is aiming to better our society by making reading cool again.
If you are the sort of person who believes that TV and the Internet have turned American culture into a post-literate scrub-land full of animal GIFs and reality TV spin-offs, then this app is definitely your jam.
If you’re wondering what the future looks like for Bookselves, just know that there’s already a huge community out there that does read and actively seeks out books. Bookselves is just the platform that will strengthen and consolidate that into a broader, intertwined, and inclusive network, and turn that community from “nerds” to “everyone.”
Maryam Labib is a software engineer based in the San Francisco Bay Area and guest writer at Bookselves. Follow her on Twitter @labibti.
Originally published at bookselves.wordpress.com on October 30, 2015.
