Discover and locate books from everyone’s bookshelf. Every is built for the publishing industry and book community.
Bookstores and publishers are used to promote to the masses, there is information about books everywhere, but it still seems impossible to find a suitable one from scattered information. How can information be tailor-made for the individuals?
Introducing Every, a platform for books. Every unites book facts and the community, providing relevant recommendations with Big Data. Not only the community can enjoy a personalised experience, but also inspire merchants, publishers, and authors to adjust their strategy.
Increase Relevance on Exploration
Have you wandered into a bookstore, looking for something to read? By importing books you have read in the inventory, Every will analyse your reading pattern and recommend books, authors and book clubs you may be interested.
On the technical aspect, it matches meta-data like genres, topics and authors with your reading history, compared with other users, and gives similar results. The more books you have read, the more relevant content you get.
Trading and Exchanging Books
Many of us have a stack of great books, but we only re-read them a few. With Every, you can trade or lend books online and open your bookshelf to everyone, so that the second-hand books can be reused, rather than become a waste.
The location is also a big issue to a deal, with filter, users can choose to trade books with locals only. The trading and exchanging features are completely free for general members. Booksellers, such as chain bookstores or second-hand bookstores, which may have a physical store somewhere, are expected to pay (on different scales) for the quotas in terms to run the business.
Building the Community
Improving the accessibility of information about books is the key to promoting reading culture. Besides book facts, having a particular channel for promotion and reviews will establish social connections between readers and booksellers.
Book Club is the right place to gather these people with similar interests. Booksellers and authors can create their own channels and collect feedbacks from the community, or even their target readers.
Reading From Another Perspective
People are used to judging a book by its cover or reading the summary at the back. Apart from the context, some motivating and inspirational book quotes are long-lived and so touching that may change one’s perspective. Users can note down quotes and share with others while reading, and these quotes will lead other readers to the book someday.
A mature reading culture is nurtured by readers, bookstores, and publishers, but not solely count on one side. Every aims at building an ecosystem for a win-win situation that makes the content and sharing more accessible and provides relevant content to everyone. Undoubtedly, it needs united effort to make it happen. Gathering open data, cooperating with various parties, and planning a business model to maintain the business, it is really hard in honest but definitely not impossible in today’s technology level, and I wish platforms like this will show up in our near future.
Demo
| Tutor | Keith Tam @ Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design |
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| Project | Final year project of the programme, Visual Communication, 2012 |
I did a UI revamp for this project — Every+. Enjoy!
