Problem: I’m proud of my library. It’s an outward sign of my erudition and an opportunity for visitors to get to know me better. But I’ve switched to e-readers and stopped buying physical books. Now my friends don’t know what I read. Or even that I read!
Solution: A family of product and services that restore this phenomenon. Online, the service should make it easy for me to show off my library of books, music, and art to friends and the public. Offline, the product should be proudly displayed in my home or workplace.
Premise: At any time in the last five centuries, you would know that you were in the home of a lover of books when you saw something like this:
In the last fifty years, you would know that you were in the home of a lover of music because you would see this:
Today, a library of a thousand books and CDs looks like this:
The world is transitioning to digital books, digital music, digital photography. The content has gone ahead, leaving the covers behind. But the spine of the book on the bookshelf, the cover art on the record sleeve – they serve a function, and that function hasn’t made the leap!
Team: The ideal team for this business would have spent a lot of time thinking about these issues. For example, they would have written something likeSubcompact Publishing or Skeuomorphs and Cultural Algorithms. They would also be familiar with automated graphic design and the Adobe suite. They would have dabbled in data visualization and would have read everything by Edward Tufte. Being book or music lovers, they would have experienced the pain point firsthand! They would have signed up for a social reading site like weread.com and should know the shortcomings of that form.
Pitch: If you’ve switched to e-readers and iPods, Skeuomorph.com makes it easy for you to show off your virtual books and CDs, in the form of an actual printed wall-size poster of your library, alphabetized by author and musician – or by title – your choice! You share your Amazon Kindle account with us, and we’ll send you beautiful, display-quality art ready to hang on your wall at home. The optional mobile app lets you scan that poster and quickly zip to any book or CD in your collection. The social function tells you what books you have in common with somebody else.