Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

Flipkart, India’s largest online bookstore today announced that it has acquired weRead, the largest social network based book recommendation and review platform. Though the acquisition amount wasn’t disclosed.

The weRead acquisition allows Flipkart to leverage advanced recommendation technologies and social graph information to enhance customer experience. With more than 3 million readers and 60 million books, weRead captures user-generated information such as who, within your social network, has marked a book as a favourite, detailed reviews and user ratings of books.

The weRead application is available across all popular social network sites such as Facebook, Orkut, Yahoo, MySpace and Hi5. Considering that purchase of books, as a category, is driven by reviews and recommendations, weRead provides an edge as it would immediately showcase community verdicts on any book.

The weRead component will make buying online at Flipkart a heightened social experience. Owing to its community-driven, independent nature, weRead will retain its own brand identity, even after the purchase by Flipkart.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Booksvilla is a startup which is joining the crowded online bookstore space. Booksvilla is founded by Chirag Rathod and Rohan Pimparkar, both students of Entrepreneurship Development Centre at Mudra Institute Communications. Both are voracious readers and very passionate about books which propelled them to develop an ecommerce site on books which will improve browsing and shopping experience.

Booksvilla has put up books 90+ categories ranging from acting to tarot, search feature is implemented well. Though prices are not very competitive when compared to flipkart.

Besides selling new books Booksvilla offers a unique, first-of-its-kind online book exchange program through its portal. The website enables its users to put up a list of books they own and also put up a wish list of books they would like to read and thus facilitates a barter system amongst its users by registering online.

After a good deal of research they realized that there was no such platform for online exchange of books and started working on this idea which became an entrepreneurial reality after putting in a lot of hard work for over a year. Cost is one of the critical factor for Indian consumers when it comes to buying any commodity, it also solidified their decision for exchange platform.

This program will indirectly also reduce piracy since the program focuses on exchanging original copies of the books.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Its been quite sometime i have bought books from offline stores since i generally don’t browse the bookshelf and buy books, i know which books i need to buy and i order it through online bookstores since its quite convenient and they offer decent discount. Before ordering i check the pricing and availability across all of them, and this process is certainly tedious and time consuming.

Indiabookstore is here to address the need of a average buyer like me,  Indiabookstore enables user to check the pricing of book, availability of book, days to deliver the book across various online bookstores. 

Indiabookstore is one of the first online book shopping aggregator to hit the market. Its a hobby project stated by Animesh Jain, founder of iTasveer and it is generating good traction.

This meta book search compares online bookportals at a time and It pulls textual data through its servers while images are fetched from the online stores at the client’s end which increases the speed of searching. I searched for Chetan Bhagat’s ’2 States’ and here is the result set -

UI is simple, clutter free and quite user friendly. Search speed is amazingly quite good and user doesn’t encounter any lag. Search results are based on relevance and ISBN. Indiabookstore supports 8 online bookstores and via affiliate programs Indiabookstore generates revenue.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Fantastic offer for book lovers, Popabook has announced 20% flat off on MRP in all the books available in their store for vcBytes readers. Use “vcb20” in the promotion coupon text field in the checkout page.

This book ‘Devil in pinstripes’ carries 10% off, after applying the coupon code i get further 10% off (flat 20% off on MRP). Make most of this offer, Popabook delivers at your doostep all over India.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Flipkart, leader in online bookstore has inspired many entrepreneurs to plunge into this space and companies like Popabook, Lebooks, Simplybooks have put in effort in developing the portal and establishing the business and operational logistics.

Bookwaale is one company which is trying to do something related to book, they are very smartly imitating Flipkart in terms of look and feel of the homepage. I took couple of seconds to realize its not flipkart. Here is the snapshot of Bookwaale -

Interestingly if you search bookwaale, you see the 1st result points to globalshiksha. Is it globalshiksha portal or they promoting it by cross linkging, something fishy i must say.

In my view Bookwaale is up for grabs, some smart jack plans to make quick bucks by enticing potential buyer  by developing oops copying the web framework of flipkart.

Good programmer innovate and smart programmer copy and paste

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com