Adgully Exclusive | Reader's paradise - Empowered by uread.com

uread.com is an online book selling portal co-founded by Piyush Goel and Gaurav Sabharwal. The portal is a right mix of technology, finance and book trade experience. The portal has a well-knit network of publishers and vendors and carries books across more than 1000+ specialty subject categories from more than 10,000 publishers. The portal is technologically well-enabled and has payment options like credit card or net banking options. The website also offers Cash on delivery across 2000 pin codes at no extra charges as an option for those who do not use a credit or debit card.

Though fairly new in the space the portal has been making its mark and increasing its customer base gradually to know more about the future plans and the growth story Adgully caught up with Goel.

Talking about what prompted the duo to start with this novel idea, Goel says, "The intention to start this was to be an exclusive books or read only portal. We are focused in creating this portal the one stop shop for every reader whether its books, e-books, magazines, newspapers etc. Gradually in a span of an year we will be able to give a complete experience to our users by providing them all kinds of publications and in various languages."

He further adds, "Gaurav brings his wide experience in publishing while my background being that of purely technology, we both work in unison to provide the best of reading material on an interactive portal format enabled with brilliant technology. We are releasing new books every month and are committed to provide the best service to our users."

Goel acknowledges that there is a potential market for portal selling books worldwide and Indian market is growing in terms of domain specific e-commerce business. He says, "The online retail market in India is growing and total books market should be around 3,000 crores, out of which organised retail sector might account to around 600 crores, online sector right now has touched around 60 plus crores. The growth in the online sector in terms of selling books has been around 50%."

The portal is looking at introducing Ebooks and adding more publishers and rare books. uRead also has international language titles. "We are looking at adding a lot of Indian regional language titles as well. In a six months time we are planning to increase visibility through book fairs, colleges, schools and exhibitions. Slowly and gradually we are looking at partnering with other service providers and you might get to see many sites reading 'Powered by uread.com' and soon we will be going for external funding," Goel adds. | By Prabha Hegde [prabha(at)adgully.com]