Re-writing the story of books and the internet
Literal is the place where you can discover your next favourite book through people you trust.
Like many of us who love to read, its co-founders Piet Terheyden and Mihai Nueleanu had been waiting for the revolution in consumer technology to do the same for books that Spotify and Netflix had done for music and movies.
Literal is specifically not trying to be either of those things for books. The point is that while we are now accustomed to some of the finest online user experiences on the planet when it comes to music and film, in the world of books we have not gotten much further than literally putting books on the internet and throwing a bunch of algorithms at them to help you do your Christmas shopping.
As Mihai puts it, the online book experience for readers had just kind of “stagnated” in the last decade — in no small part due to one company’s utter dominance in this field and its ultimate obsession with driving users towards their next purchase.
The promise of Literal is to get back to that early vision of the web: as a place to connect people around topics and ideas that fascinate them. The idea that we can use technology to take our experience as book lovers to a new dimension and maybe even leave the book industry in better shape while we’re at it. An online reading experience for the modern online era.
Piet and Mihai
At heart, Literal is about bringing like-minded people together and that is also in the DNA of how we start companies in the Founders studio. In this case Stefano and Sebastian were excited by their early exploration of what we now consider a huge — and unsolved — opportunity to build a truly great community platform for readers.
In Piet and Mihai we found people who shared that vision. As is often the case we knew each other already — Mihai previously worked with us as tech lead at Kiosk and Piet worked for us a freelance designer — building our website among other things.
Both had played around building digital tools for books in their spare time: Piet built some prototypes for sharing reading lists with friends and Mihai built a website where you can download any book that has passed out of copyright online for free.
We came together over a shared excitement about building a product that could both solve our own problem of where our next favourite book is coming from. But also a product that helps all ‘stakeholders’ in this market thrive: from readers and authors to publishers and book sellers.
Trust beats algorithms
Literal is built around the idea that it’s more useful to you to know that someone you admire thinks a book is good than what 1000 random people on the internet think or what the New York Times bestseller List says.
Young readers are already voting with their feet — just look at the rise of ‘Booktokkers’, ‘Booktubers’ and ‘Bookstagrammers’ who in joyful, fizzing, sub-sets of the internet are attracting hundreds of thousands of followers who want to hear their opinions on young adult fiction books.
These formats and genres aren’t for everyone, of course. The point is that the story of books and the internet, which looked like a foregone conclusion 10 years ago, is now being re-written. Literal is here to capture that momentum with a product where users are in control.
It’s about letting you choose whose opinions you care about and connecting with people who share your passions: be it female detective leads in historical Renaissance fiction, youth sub cultures in 1960s Greece or turn-of-the century gardening techniques.
Literal is a place where Booktokkers with 300k followers can run a book club and your sister can run her lockdown book club with eight members and feel at home.
It’s a product that invites you to dwell in the experience of reading itself. Where you can dive into the atoms that make up a book, share the moments that move you and discuss the ideas you find compelling.
It’s about guiding readers to share something, in a few words or a thousand, about what a book made them feel — rather than how many pages they have read. Most likely you aren’t going to pick up a book because you saw some guy you were at school with is 74% through it, but you might if someone whose taste you trust describes it as a ‘magnetic, fast-paced, dazzling read’.
Piet: “You can compare books a lot to music where people listen to different genres and artists. In the book world, it’s the same. Trusting a review from a stranger that has a completely different taste, doesn’t make any sense but that’s the current state that we are living in.”
Today Literal is a compact team based out of Berlin, Copenhagen and the US drawn together by a love of books and the dream of building a place on the internet for our literary lives that feels like home.
Mihai: “I’ve had some of the most fun that I’ve had in my life working on a project professionally with Literal.
“We’ve clicked from the beginning (and the culture we have has) come pretty naturally — especially because of the fact that we work remotely a lot. Me and Piet met for the first time after working together for about six months. Maybe it wasn’t the most normal thing in the world.”
Take a peek at what they’re building with our secret invite link and then join our book club. Happy reading!
Founders Stories
This is the latest edition of Founders Stories, where we sit down with our portfolio co-founders to talk about how they became entrepreneurs, what problem they’re solving and why the world needs what they are building. Catch the whole series here.
About us
Founders is a startup studio based in Copenhagen. Together with brilliant entrepreneurs we build companies that radically improve the way we live and work. We’re behind companies solving everything from the pain of company expenses and banking for freelancers to solving the chronic shortage of educated tech talent in Europe.
