Creating new business models around a world-class library patron experience

When my co-founders and I began BookSurge in 2000, it was an excellent time to dive into the publishing world, especially if you knew nothing about it. We had no previous publishing industry experience that would inform our view of how the company would operate. In this mindset, we asked ourselves: Why not be a publisher, printer, and retailer all at once? The slate was totally clean. I view BiblioBoard and the way we see the library market in a similar way. We survey the landscape of the library world primarily as technologists rather than as people who have to support legacy business models when building tools for libraries. Over recent years, there has been a great deal of chatter surrounding the future of libraries and publishing. The predominant arguments range from the pessimistic “Libraries are becoming obsolete! No one reads real books anymore!” to radical traditionalists who refuse to buy a Kindle or acknowledge the growth of e-material. While the truth lies somewhere in the middle, the more important argument is about the mindset of librarians, patrons and the general public. How are libraries competing with the elegant user experiences delivered by consumer companies such as Amazon, Netflix, Evernote and other mobile experiences that have set a very high bar for user expectations?