Startup Idea: Book Review Management Software

Startup idea to build a software for the publishing industry, book bloggers, and YouTubers. The software should simplify tracking of review status, manage scanning and categorizing of books, generate relevant statistics, and permit publishing reviews directly from the platform.

I work in the publishing industry. People send my company copies of upcoming books in the hopes we will review them on our websites, our print publications and generally spread the word.

We get hundreds of books a month, which makes it very difficult to keep track of what got reviewed, who reviewed it, what still needs to be reviewed, what won't get reviewed.

The big problem we have is categorizing and tracking books that have been read and also books that still need to be read.

We currently use complicated Excel sheets, some apps and some websites to take care of our needs, when what we really need is one software that can offer everything. Something that would:

1. Allow the scanning in of books manually or via barcode scanner
2. Ability to mark a book as having been read or still needs to be read and by which date
3. Input of metadata such as author name and genre
4. Ability to track statistics (how many books read by author/genre/etc.) over a lifetime or certain time period (for instance, the ability to see what percentage of books read in a certain month were in the fantasy genre).
5. Fields for personal notes or reviews (and the ability to publish onto blog or social media from software).

It's not just book publishers who need this. It's also anyone who reviews books. For example, book bloggers and YouTubers are also using complicated Excel sheets for the same reason.