Russian Samizdat found support

The founders of the Ridero project, Alexander Kasyanenko and Alexander Gavrilov, bring to the market the technology of automation of book layout, which will allow publishers to reduce the cost of production, and authors will independently create and sell books.

“The service will reduce the cost of preparing a book ten times and save the time of full -time editors,” RBC Daily quoted the words of the publishing business veteran Alexander Kasyanenko. In the mid-2000s, he decided to start publishing electronic books and thought about how to reduce the cost of the process.

“Having talked at one of the book exhibitions with Dmitry Kravchuk, the founder of the sites“ Poems.ru ”and“ Prose.ru ”, I realized that this should be a public site that could take on the technical work of the layouts,” recalls Alexander Kasyanenko.

It took more than five years to develop a new service. In the fall of 2012, Alexander Gavrilov joined the project, in the past, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Book Review, today is the co-owner of the cafe Artefaq , FAQ-CAFE , Defaqto and Squat Cafe .

“Now the book market is undergoing a crisis, the roles of publishers, printing houses and distributors of books are changing every year. Technologies die in packs. We decided to offer a tool that corresponds to new realities, ”said Gavrilov.

The co -founders have already invested about 4 million rubles in the Ridero project. As part of the closed testing this week, publishers begin to connect to the service (there will be more than ten of them). The public launch of the project is dedicated to the opening of the Non/Fiction Intellectual Literature Fair, which will be held in Moscow from November 27 to December 1.

Ridero allows publishers to automatically make up the book by uploading the text and images (today in Ridero there are four layout layouts, by the end of the year their number will reach 25-30). The system distributes the text according to the pages, based on the parameters of the selected layout, recognizes the names of chapters, epigraphs and footnotes, and retains breakdown into paragraphs. In addition, it corrects incorrectly arranged transfers, removes the gaps in front of the commas, prescribes the output. On Ridero , you can choose a title sheet, get ISBN (international standard book number)-and then send a book to the shelf of the online store.

The basic functionality of the service will be free for users. Publishers will have to pay only if they want to redeem layout models developed by Ridero (the cost of one layout is 990 rubles). Using the two main sources of income, Ridero plans to pass a break -in -line point during the year.

The company has already agreed on the sale of books published using Ridero with Ozon.ru. To finalize the technology and testing of the Ridero business model, another 10-12 million rubles will be required, which entrepreneurs plan to attract from private investors. Among those who test the Ridero system are publishing houses such as Rosman, as well as several more large companies.

After a year and a half, having debugged the model in the Russian market, Gavrilov and Kasyanenko plan to offer their product to European and then American publishers and novice authors. In their opinion, it will be easier to advance in new markets than in Russia - in most European countries the book business receives state support.