
Apply HN: Booksauce – Episodic Videobooks - booksauce
Problem: People are reading less, specially younger ones, and attention span has declined from 12 to 5 mins in the past 10 years. 63% of people believe books are important, and wish they read more but they don’t because they don’t like reading.<p>Product: We will produce engaging video books. Each video book is about 15 episodes, and each is 7 minutes long. It’d cost only $3,000 to make a book into episodic videos, about double what it costs to make an audiobook. We will develop a platform that will manage the pipeline of videobook creation including editors abridging the book, shooting actors in studios, and visual effects designers and authors working through the production. Custom software further automate the process of adding visual effects and processing the videos. On the other side, we will develop a market place like Audible’s for purchasing and streaming videobooks.<p>Demo: Here’s a sample episode: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=M9clIRapyJM &amp; an iOS app to try: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;booksauce&#x2F;id1089945842?ls=1&amp;mt=8<p>What we’ve done so far: an iOS app, and produced the book Think and Grow Rich into a video book, and signed up several authors to have their books produced into videobooks.<p>What Else is Out There to Solve This: Some have done video summaries that run about 5 mins or so for an entire book, but that is too abridged and are barely good enough to know the topics the book covers.<p>Revenue Stream: Books will be sold in our platform at $9.99, with 20-25% going to a book’s right-holders.<p>TLDR: A platform for production of episodic video books based on non-fiction books. These video books are divided into 15 episodes of 7 mins, and our goal here is to target millennials and others who no longer have the attention span to read a 300-page book.
======
chaostheory
At first, I didn't really understand what you were offering when a lot of
people are perfectly happy with Audible and podcasts in general. It wasn't
until I saw your demo video when it clicked for me and I really really like
what you have. I kind of understand why you guys are marketing this as 'video
books', but what I see is a semi-automated documentary factory. Your platform
can potentially help people create quality documentaries at a fraction of the
time and cost. Content hungry companies like Netflix and Amazon (for Prime
Video) would drool at your platform's potential.

You can probably make something similar to like say 'The Story of Maths' with
what you have now or the near future.

Hopefully your Apply HN doesn't completely blow mine away, which I'll be
posting this coming week ;)

~~~
booksauce
Do you find yourself reading as much as you want to?

~~~
chaostheory
Yes, especially with Audible's help. With Audible, I can 'read' books when I'm
on the subway, when I'm in the doctor's office, when I'm in traffic, when I'm
doing mind numbing manual chores, when I'm working; you get the picture.
Podcasts are a good substitute when I get tired of books in audio form. For
most books, I don't just need any visuals. Since Audible is owned by Amazon,
for me the pricing is pretty good.I get multiple books a month and they have
frequent sales. Averaged out I easily spend less than $10 per book

I have only one complaint about audio books, specifically works of fiction. My
gripe is that they tend to only have one reader / narrator. ie. A male or
female narrator will take on all the roles of a book's characters which
typically have both males and females. Most of the time, even when the
narrator is good at voicing the opposite sex, it's still not goo enough to
suspend disbelief and it makes it an inferior experience to actually reading
the book as opposed to just listening to it. This needs to change. I'd rather
pay more than keep the status quo. Consequently, I tend to only listen to non-
fiction audio books.

The second problem I have is with all audio content in general. There's simply
so much quality content now that I'm finding myself not being able to listen
to everything I want.

