Announcing My New Job: CEO of BookRiff
It’s official! After my last post about the challenging business environment in Vancouver, I am thrilled to announce that I have taken on the role of CEO for a top-notch startup called BookRiff! So, Vancouver, like it or not, you are stuck with me for a little more time 
I am extremely excited by BookRiff because they have developed a solution to a very important (and fundamental) issue facing media today, namely: How can consumers use media as they wish, while also ensuring that content owners get paid?! BookRiff answers this question quite elegantly and simply.
Essentially, BookRiff is a technology platform that allows consumers to mix content from virtually any source–published books, websites, and their own files–to build custom compilations called Riffs. Think of Riffs as “Mixtapes of Text”. Each time a Riff is distributed, all content owners and contributors get paid. BookRiff’s technology manages the authoring, bundling, licensing, attribution, and payment details for each of these custom compilations. That’s pretty powerful!
To provide a little history, BookRiff was initially incubated within Vancouver-based D&M Publishers, one of Canada’s largest independent publishers, and was recently spun-off as an independent venture. I have been “dating” the company for a couple of months and we mutually decided it was finally time to “go steady”! I am thrilled that President of D&M Publishers and founder of Bookriff, Mark Scott, has entrusted me to drive BookRiff’s future success! We already have some great partners and plans in place and we are building a phenomenal team! Do stay tuned for more exciting announcements in the very near future!
8 Comments »
Awesome, congratulations Rochelle, I’m sure you’ll rock their world, well done. I’m in London now btw, drop me a line when you’re free.
Take care
Jonathan
Congratulations Rochelle! This is a great concept and in addition to the huge self-publishing market, I suspect it could be very useful for college and university profs as well, as they often need to create custom compilations of different articles for their courses.
I am also hoping BookRiff or another company will invest in technology to create the next level of interactive online social book reading, such as PressDisplay.com (online newspaper publisher) for books, or web-app versions of the Kindle, iPad & eReader, where readers can browse & read books and also have discussions with other readers within the app on individual pages of the book.
Thanks, Kulpreet! Yes, we are already working with the academic industry.
I really like your ideas around social book reading and discussion! I firmly believe that there will be some truly innovative and intriguing new business models and consumer behaviors in the very near future. And, of course, I plan to position BookRiff firmly in the center of these developments That said, I’ll be sure to keep you posted and might check in periodically to brainstorm about any other ideas in this space. Thanks again!
Rochelle — congrats, this is a really exciting time to be in the midst of a company like BookRiff.
This is the super exciting news you had to keep secret, big congrats Rochelle, I know you’ll be a huge asset and a thought leader when it comes to taking this new model to the next level.
I look forward to using it as a blogger!
Natalie
Thanks, Boris and Natalie! Now the real exciting work begins 
June 20, 2010 @ 10:09 am
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