As we are often asked for business details, our team has assembled a Sharing-Books Quick Fact Sheet (as of January 2010).
- Conceived in February 2007 - founded in October 2007 - website Sharing-Books.com launched in September 2008
- Built in Joomla open source platform
- website without flash - designed for low bandwidth regions of the world
- Shared Books Ltd (owner of Sharing-Books.com) is a privately held Canadian company, incorporated in British Columbia with a number of individual and corporate shareholders
- Became promotional partner of Room to Read at start-up
- Revenue sharing 1/3, 1/3, 1/3. Sharing Books is a for profit social enterprise that shares its revenue equally between the book creators, Room to Read, and operating the company
- Published 250 books in its first year, one of the largest publisher of new children's books in Canada and the world
- Sharing-Books.com is used in libraries and schools around the world from California to Ukraine to Australia
- 25,000 e-books downloaded reaching an estimated 125,000 readers
- Held three book creators contests in 2009
- A current project includes transforming our e-books into video-books for distribution on content selling sites.
- Publishing partner of Bookshare.org, the world largest online library for the visually challenged
- Sharing-Books acquires classic children books that are over 100 years old, scans them and republishes them as e-books
- E-books save trees - not printing 250 books saves one paper tree.
- Sharing-Books is an active participant in the annual E-Book Week (March)
- Sharing-Books has been recommended by a number of parenting and technology sites and blogs
- Sharing-Books operates a virtual office with participants from several cities in British Columbia and Alberta.
- Sharing-Books creators come from North America, Europe, India, Asia and Australia.
- We use a unique licensing agreement that lets the creators retain the copyrights to their work. The license grant Sharing-Books the rights to further develop the intellectual property of the books.
- Sharing-Books has a speed publishing process that can approve and publish a book in 48 hours.
- Sharing-Books' content is vetted by a team of volunteer librarians.
- The publishing process enables book creators to update their books with new versions.
- The PDF version of the books is available to anyone for free, and the video versions of the books will be sold for a micro-payment.
