Lalit Sharma and Manik Ghawri are avid readers, with somewhat similar preferences. The former prefers biographies, while the latter has a broader spectrum that he describes vaguely as “non-fiction”. But the Delhi-based business partners are aware that most book lovers prefer a wide spectrum of genres. Hence, their app Vowelor not only has peer-contributed libraries (not of books yet, but reading lists, suggestions and reviews) but also book clubs that can be themed, as specific as ‘Potterhead’ and as broad as ‘Readathon: one book per week’.
Vowelor began in 2017 as a Facebook community, founded by the duo. When their numbers swelled to 60,000, Manik and Lalit thought of doing something larger. Today, the Facebook group has over 72,000 members (over 1,000 having joined in the past month alone) and their Android app has 5,000 downloads. An iOS version is on its way, too.
Vowelor is essentially meant to be a one-stop shop for book lovers, with news about fresh releases, theme-based reading list suggestions, innumerable fora and reviews all rolled into one. And it seems to be working: if the numbers are anything to go by, the platform has a following of its own. But for any online platform dealing with books, comparisons with that one social cataloguing giant — Goodreads — are inevitable.
So it’s not surprising that Manik has an answer down pat for that particular question. “Goodreads is focused on good book reviews. Their major traffic comes through the search keyword ‘review’,” he says, “But we are focussing more on building real-time communities. We are enabling people to set up micro-communities and fandoms in the app, and talk to people of similar interests.”
He elaborates on how this would happen on Vowelor: “You can just sign up and create a book club. When you do, you also create tags related to your fandom. These tags will help your club be suggested to other users, based on their libraries.” A library, in this case, is each user’s list of all the books they have read, are currently reading, and are planning to read. So — and this is what sounds fun — when you join a club, you can enter the combined library, see what books there are and who owns which one. Plus, if someone’s taste in literature really resonates with you, you can also connect with those people through an individual chat request. “And you can add your friends, whose tastes in reading you already share,” adds Manik.
But...
The one drawback is that the platform currently doesn’t have books themselves. “In the current session, we have no peer-reading facility,” he admits. But there are other things to look forward to: book clubs form one of two pillars in the app. The other is the variety of discussion panels. “Unlike the book clubs, any user can post on these,” says Manik.
So who are the people posting on the fora and forming these clubs? According to founders, users are 66% women, and 60% in the 18-34 age group. “About 45% of them are from India, the rest are from the US, UK and Philippines mainly,” adds Manik. They also seem to primarily enjoy reading self-help, poetry and nanotales.
For an initially bootstrapped entity, Vowelor seems to be going pretty steady in a short time. “We poured our own money into the initial website, then did some research before trying to get seed funding. Only after the launch did we get an angel investor to put in some pre-series funding. Now, we can start spending on things like proper salaries,” he says.
