As Caroline mentioned, we met a lot of people during last week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Many seemed to recognize SharedBook or knew something about our business, but there were also quite a few that did not. Without a doubt, the first question in that case was, “What is Reverse Publishing?”
It is a question we hear often as a company that is pioneering the concept. I thought I would take some time today to talk about it. I know we've mentioned Reverse Publishing here before, probably more than once since it's part of our core business, but I don't think we've ever defined it. Here's how we see it.
In the 1990's, the majority of Web content originated offline where it was repurposed for online consumption. Now, in the era of Web 2.0, billions of pieces of content -- text, data and photos as well as audio and video -- are published first to the Web. Yet, there is surprisingly little way to extract this content, a lot of it holding great value to consumers (for example: Legacy.com, CarePages.com, Sportography.com, among others), to a physical offline product.
Reverse Publishing inverts the process. Or as Bridget likes to say, "Free(s) the Web!" We take information that exists online such as archived materials, database information and user-generated content and publish it in a more permanent form -- the book. According to recent estimates, there are some 14 billion pages of content available online today and growing.
Fundamentally, we believe that the printed form will never disappear, albeit it is evolving. Given the amount of content available online today, and the response we've seen from consumers and potential business partners to date (it seems like everywhere we go, we learn of new ideas in different industries), we believe the opportunities to Reverse Publish content from the Web to print are wide open. We’d love to hear what you think.
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