Leipzig loves L-Books – our first book fair booth ever

L-Pub presents its technology to learners & readers at Leipzig Book Fair 2017. Interest was overwhelming. Read our synopsis and survey results.

Perhaps the “L” in L-Pub should stand for Leipzig. It was here in 2015 that we had our first investor pitch as part of the PubTech accelerator CONTENTshift. The 2017 Leipzig Book Fair is also the first time that L-Pub has had a booth at a book fair. The response from visitors was extraordinarily positive.

To collect immediate feedback on our offer, we surveyed a wide mix of readers who passed by our mini-booth in the Startup Village Neuland 2.0. After showing them our prototype, an overwhelming 90% said they would like curated, in-context pop-ups in their e-books, too. That is, they want L-Books – like the texts in our StoryPlanet apps.

Learning by reading

A core competence at L-Pub is the ability to harness natural language processing (NLP) for educational purposes. Our original focus on using NLP for learning German as a foreign language is now paying off, as we have effectively transformed the entire German language into a set of data. That means our technology can turn nearly any text written in German into a learning tool with little to no effort. Look forward to new texts being added to our StoryPlanet Deutsch app!

Innovation vs. inspiration

David P. Steel and Leonore Kleinkauf from L-Pub were invited to participate in a podium talk with Dr. Okke Schlüter and Stefanie Quade, authors of DesignAgility, a recently published book on innovation methodology. As a professor in media publishing at the Hochschule der Medien in Stuttgart, Dr. Okke Schlüter was curious to know how L-Pub applies Design Thinking and other agile methods in our day-to-day work.

The discussion was lively and, appropriate to the subject, took some unexpected curves as we explored the whole spectrum of creativity, from those priceless inspirations you have under the shower to the implementation of carefully planned traction models to test a product or marketing strategy.

We concluded that all approaches are valid but none on their own is sufficient: inspiration without structure is just as inefficient and self-referential as pure methodology without creativity.

Are readers ready for L-Books?

While we were in Leipzig, we wanted to take advantage of the mini-booth to talk to as many people as possible about L-Books. To attract people to the booth, we handed out branded packages of organic trail mix. Fair visitors loved the alternative to the usual sweets or ball-point pens and many of them then agreed to have a look at what we had to offer.

To start with, we let visitors play with our prototype of Rotkäppchen for learning German. Most visitors were also learning a foreign language and immediately loved the concept. But even those who weren’t, saw it as a real reason to read digital.

For those who had a few minutes of time, we also conducted a survey. A total of 44 people took part and the results were impressive:

• 88% said they were interested in having in-context popups in their digital books
• 82% percent said they would be willing to pay extra for the added functionality (compared to an e-book)
• 68% percent said they regularly read e-books already
• 61% said they would prefer to buy L-Books individually as opposed to paying a monthly subscription or flat rate

Special thanks to Olga Khorkova (a recent graduate in computer linguistics) and Mohammad Mbydeen (a recent MBA graduate) who helped out at the of the booth. As both of them have learned German as a foreign language, they were particularly passionate about our prototype and immediately understood how to present it to passers-by. They were also largely responsible for conducting the surveys. We could not have pulled off the fair without them and are thrilled they were able to make themselves available at rather short notice before the fair.

Special thanks also to the organizers and the jury of Neuland 2.0 who selected L-Pub as one of the few publishing service providers invited to participate in the “Startup Village”. It was a privilege to be there and now we know for sure, Leipzig is lucky place for L-Pub.

Contact L-Pub for more information about L-Books.