WEbook has raised $5 million in funding. The round was led by WEbook’s new investor, Vertex Venture Capital and its existing backer, Greylock Partners Israel. The round also included investments from eight unnamed angel investors.
WEbook is an online platform where the site’s users — authors, writers, and even readers — collaborate to write books. Since its April 2008 launch, WEbook has added thousands of writers, editors, illustrators, and readers to its service and the site is currently hosting 15,000 book projects in genres ranging from short stories to non-fiction. Once a book is completed, it goes through a community vetting process where the users vote on books. Those that perform best during the process will be published by WEbook. WEbook shares 50 percent of the profit on sales with the author and the book’s major contributors as a fee for publishing the title.
So far, it looks like WEbook’s efforts are working. The site’s unique visitor count is on the rise, according to Compete data, and it witnessed 17 percent growth over the past month.
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Another great example of the power of crowdsourcing. Writing a book and getting published is a daunting task and I’m glad to see a site that uses the power of the crowd to determine writers and books that can be successful.
Another way to show the internet breaking down traditional barriers. I wonder what is the split between the company and the writers?
Interesting application of crowd sourcing. Book writing is a very time consuming process and the internet is a great medium to help break that. Wonder if the internet could help with textbook writing to bring down the costs of textbooks…..
congrats to Itay Kokhavi. I still have on my desk their first publication
Good concept, may be we can see few more JK Rowlings but without the struggle and hardship
This sounds pretty interesting. I’m going to keep my eye on this.
i agree with you, the good news today!
Following those guys for a while, amazing how much progress they did. Love the design.
I love the idea. Great way to promote books in the tough world of publishing!
Great concept. As someone who would like to have their short stories read and reviewed to see if possibly one of them could be sent of and published as a childrens story, I will definitely be signing up.
Craig
http://www.budgetpulse.com
(linkback) Thrive or Fail? WeBook: users write books together, vote on the best, publish [VOTE] - http://www.thriveorfail.com/1a3e0
There’s tons of fun projects on the site. With $5mn, we should expect to see a lot more exciting things!
Unrelated, Pandora’s a good read. Thanks, Ouriel Ohayon…(I swear I am not the author…)
Am not sure if $5M makes any sense to this type of company. How many people really go to this website and write stuff. I would rather go to websites like http://www.cruxle.com where I can discover my favorite books and read them online for free .. In fact, I just found Da vinci code for free in this website and the recommendations to that book are great to me. My few cents.
You may have missed the concept … it’s more about new authors getting their book published by the top publishers. My job at a similar company (Blosm) (see my comment below) was to get buy-in from top publishers. Every one we spoke with said they loved the idea. Think of it as a “rated” slush pile. It gives publishers a leg-up on what the public will actually pay for; so then they can feel stronger about their decision to publish it.
What will the $5 mil be used for? Printing books? You have to have a lot of best selllers to make money in the book biz - or thousands of utility titles. It’s interesting, but how will it make money for its investors.
I’m glad this concept is coming round again. I worked with the creators of the idea nearly 10 years ago. Unfortunately it was during the dot bomb and we ran out of money early. I wish this team the very best. Our name was Blosm (By the light of the silvery moon).
Love sites that bring collaborators together to actually “create” something.
this may be the next level up for the social networking sites. online collaboration to create/achieve something; we’re already starting see some sites like these and they’re great.
that would very helpful site for book writer, they would know where and how to publish book.
I am a very active member/poet with over 6500 visits since joining in August ‘08. I ranked number 5 and 7 in the Spring ‘09 voting cycle. I have my reservations about the direction of WEBook. As can be seen on the current site visit graph at Crunchbase.com (where I found the link to this page), since Aug ‘08 activity drops after each publishing ‘green light’ announcement due to dissatisfaction with WEbook processes and choices.