As per a National Book Trust NCAER survey in 2009, there were 83 million Indians (13-35 age group) reading books for leisure in 2009. Reading in Hindi, Marathi, Bengali and English primarily, 46 percent of the respondents chose "knowledge enhancement" as a reason for reading books.
With the world's youngest working population, Indians are increasingly seeking out knowledge as their ticket to prosperity in this knowledge economy. But the problem for this young generation is "In this knowledge economy, I need to KNOW MORE and YET, I lack the TIME to know more"
bookbhook.com intends to solve this problem with its service promise of 'know more without reading more'. As India's first books based micro-learning service, bookbhook curates non-fiction books that are then converted into short book summaries which you can read on the bookbhook app in just a few minutes. Reading carries a strong cultural context.
It is important to not only feature books in the Indian context, but also speak the language of the Indian book reader. Gaurav Gupta asks "Why should a small entrepreneur from Aligarh not get access to concepts of entrepreneurship from the book 'The Lean Startup' by Eric Ries? There are three hurdles for this entrepreneur in a small Indian town - discoverability of the book, language of the book and the time commitment to read the book. Bookbhook.com removes all these barriers by thoughtfully curating books, converting the books into short ten minutes summaries and then converting these summaries into Hindi."
Bookbhook, which is an Android and Apple store app has more than 32000 downloads and offers more than 50 book summaries on its app for free. It is currently building a pipeline of more than 200 books.
bookbhook.com from Marcus Aurelius Learning Solutions Pvt. Ltd. is founded by Gaurav Gupta. An IIM Ahmedabad alumnus, Gaurav has had 15 years corporate experience working with brands like Coca Cola, Citibank, Nokia and Tata Docomo. Bookbhook is currently in bootstrapping phase and is a part of the FbStart bootstrap track.