BiblioCrunch relaunches as an e-book services marketplace that helps publishers find talent

BiblioCrunch‘s e-book services marketplace is now open to the public, the New York-based startup announced today, right on time for Book Expo America. According to its CEO Miral Sattar, its ambition is to create new opportunities for authors, publishers and e-book service providers to work together.

This segment is particularly underserved, Sattar says. As a matter of fact, BiblioCrunch started as a digital publishing platform, but decided to pivot as that space became increasingly crowded. With its new model, it hopes to provide a service understaffed publishers are actively looking for, while giving skilled freelancers a chance to sell their work.

In practical terms, BiblioCrunch wants to help publishers and authors to create quality e-books. By ‘quality’, it means that their customization goes far beyond standard templates available on platforms such as iBooks Author. If you are wondering how it looks like, you can check out ‘New York City’s Crowdsourced Dessert Guide,’ an e-book BiblioCrunch created with its own solution.

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To achieve this result, content owners can find specialized talent for each vertical of the e-book creation cycle, from proofreaders to illustrators.

While BiblioCrunch boasts deals with big publishers it can’t name publicly, it also hopes to cater to smaller players with different needs. In the dedicated section of its site, authors and publishers can post their projects and publishing budget. The platform then finds qualified professionals who can bid to complete these jobs.

According to Sattar, BiblioCrunch’s professional community includes over 500 pre-approved freelancers, which users can also rate and review:

“With our platform, users will have access to high quality ePublishing professionals from around the world to create the best books. We vet every e-book service provider who requests to join the service. Our participating freelancers include e-book professionals with backgrounds from Harper Collins, Bloomsbury, Random House, Time Magazine, New York Times and several university presses.”

While the platform itself could ironically use a better design, it seems fairly straightforward to use, and pretty complete. Besides its marketplace, it also offers a one-click publishing tool which lets content owners create files in different formats (.ePub, .mobi and PDF) for submission to the main e-book retailers. “With the BiblioCrunch e-book services marketplace, the book publishing process becomes seamless and easy,” Sattar promises.