News
South Carolina Company Wins National O\'Reilly\'s Publishing Technology Award
February 16, 2012
Serendipite Studios of Mount Pleasant
is the winner for technology the O’Reilly Publishing Startup Showcase. The
competition is part of O’Reilly’s Tools of Change Publishing Conference held
this week 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.”