5/6/2023 0 Comments Booku means![]() We are targeting to sign up a few brick-and-mortar book rentals stores and book stores.” “We will go full scale on digital marketing and roadshows. On the local front, they’re going with a three-pronged approach for expansion. But they say that they’re handling it and things are going according to plans. “The biggest of all is getting the book owners to list their books. Currently it is a manual and tedious process,” he said. Like all businesses, they’ve faced tremendous amounts of challenges throughout their development. We aspire to bring back the good old book reading habit and at the same time enable readers to save big bucks on their books,” Siva explained. “The Booku team is very optimistic and confident that we will be able to make a positive social impact. The underlying vision he has for his business is the hope of making a mark in society: letting them know the true joy of reading books. They can start creating ‘readlists’ and other users can start following the list and add comments, discuss or invite other users to participate,” said Siva. “Avid readers can become influencers on Booku. One such strategy is to introduce a social element. When asked about their thoughts on the future of the company, they remain confident that the business concept will thrive and they are deploying strategies to further boost their numbers-but there’s much to be done to accomplish such a feat. Book owners may not be too keen to list their books because of lack of renters and vice versa,” Siva said. “Which one we focus on first is a chicken and egg situation. They must find a balance between the two parties as they complement one another. Their main objective now is to increase the number of registered users-both book renters and rentees-on the platform. Image credit: Bookuįrom supervising to managing the business, the team needs to please both sides of the coin. “We will be running plenty of roadshows in both public and private universities starting from July 2017 to sign up more book owners with textbooks and reference books,” he explained. That is still an ongoing challenge that they’re addressing. Once they had their list, they jumped into action to find owners who are willing to rent those books out. They chose to focus on this genre as they noticed how expensive buying-or even renting-academic books are. “We have already built a list of 2,000 textbooks and reference books based on Malaysian public universities,” Siva mentioned. Siva and his team are currently building the platform to be catered for those searching for academic texts and reference books. Booku focused on covering niche target markets before expanding their varieties. “Recurring bad behaviour can result in the book owner or book renter to be blacklisted from the platform,” said Siva. There’ll be different actions taken depending on the severity of the issue. This is to ensure that the books-and users-remain accountable within the community. They only charge the daily rental rate (set by the book owners themselves) to the customers and no additional deposit fee will be imposed.īooku also implements a 2-way rating system for the users. ![]() Unlike rental stores such as SS Readers Corner where you’re expected to pay a deposit of the original price of the books upfront, Booku has a unique system of their own. The revenue is then used to maintain the platform and provide further assistance and support for the users of Booku. ![]() ![]() The social element of this platform also plays a vital role in forming the core idea as it allows users to give recommendations, have discussions on different topics, and share their personal reading lists.Īs they are just a middleman between the book renters and rentees, Booku monetises through the small amounts deducted from the revenue of the book owners and topping up the fees charged towards the rentals. The core concept is a simple one-to let book lovers enjoy a variety of reads at a cheap rate as well as to share and generate income with their own collection of books. They aspire to be the largest library in the world-without owning a single book in hand. Within 5 months, they launched the online platform-Booku. With that vision in mind, he created his company with 4 co-founders in 2016. “I wanted to buy another book from the bookstore at the airport but I thought how nice it would be if I could just share this book with someone at the airport who would be interested and I could get the book shipped to me later.” “Whenever I travel, I always carry a book with me and it was during one of my travels to KK that I got the idea to develop this business,” Sivanathan Subramaniam, founder of Booku, explained. During a short wait in the airport, Siva was struck by an idea. ![]()
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