Startups from Finland: MahShelf Is Trying To Become YouTube For Books
Brand new Finnish Startup MahShelf is “a place where everybody can read and share books online”. Users can upload their books or just single pages and can create Flash books that can be shared with their friends and the whole world. The books can commented and rated in very YouTube -kind of way.
From the Mahshelf blog:
We hope that MahShelf can become a huge shelf of books where you can create, read and share all the books you want (comics, novels, magazines etc.) in a fun and simple way. By uploading image files (and in the future, document files), you can make a “Flash book” that everyone can read and discuss online. The best part is: no long-time-waiting for downloads. Each page is streamed one after another right after you open the book, and every uploaded image is compressed to reduce file size.
The best description what that means in reality can be found on the site is buried in their terms of use:
MahShelf.com is an innovative website that provides free social networking and book hosting service, which allows users to create profiles and groups, find, read, upload, comment and share their books online. While users can have unlimited storage space, the size of each book is limited to 10 MB and 50 pages (images) to control bandwidth cost. [...] The MahShelf Website includes all aspects of MahShelf, including but not limited to all products, software and services offered via the website such as the MahShelf “(book) shelves”, the MahShelf “Embeddable (book) Reader,” the MahShelf “(book) Uploader” and other applications.
Mahshelf really sounds like a YouTube for books, doesn’t it.
About Mashelft
MahShelf Ltd. was founded in the end of 2007 by 3 university students in Espoo, Finland and the site opened in the beginning of march 2008.
The site is built on Symfony PHP framework and is the first Finnish startup that is using Amazon S3 for storage, which is really the place where new startups should be built.
Conclusion
MahShelf is in private beta (public beta coming shortly, maybe already in April) and some of the features, such as the embedding of books, are not working yet. When they get further this might become a useful little service. There are no signs of advertising or any other business model on the site, but they are really in the early stages so I didn’t expect one. Nonetheless this is an ambitious startup that has applied a working model to a new area. It’s a shame that there already exists a “YouTube for Books” - Scribd.
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Comments
Date: March 21, 2008 | Time: 1:16 pm
We have been using S3 since last October ;). S3 is great.
Date: April 15, 2008 | Time: 8:49 pm
[...] today I received an email from Odin Chen, one of the three students that founded Mahshelf (which I dubbed earlier “YouTube for books”) that their site has opened into public beta testing, as they promised they would do in [...]
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