[RFC - Request for Company] A Platform for Videobooks

Books (and more recently, blogs) are how people share knowledge. However Millennials and Gen Z find videos to be incredibly more accessible. 73% of US adults use Youtube (currently at 2B MAUs) and 1B hours of video is viewed per day. Personally, I’ve noticed I ask people if they read, but I usually ask someone what they watch on Youtube/Netflix instead - it’s a given they watch something. The problem is, an overwhelming amount of content on Youtube consumed is purely entertainment - games, vlogs, talk shows, etc. whereas books strike a better balance between fiction and non-fiction.

A videobook is a short (30m to 1.5h) production of a book that covers nearly everything. This would work well for non-fiction, and could be split into individual ~10min videos so each chapter is individually indexed. Fiction might not lend itself really well to this model, and readers likely prefer reading an original fiction to hearing about it anyway.

It’s not like an audiobook in that someone reads a book verbatim - the video format gives you much more bandwidth to explain concepts faster and more clearly than in the book. Think of it more like a youtuber explaining the content using animations, voice, slideshows, or just talking into a camera.

Example: This video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs - is an adaptation of this book - http://amzn.to/2fgBWps.

What I want is something that looks like Audible, where I can find a book, and when I click on it, instead of buying and listening to it, I can see one or many videobooks versions of it. The videobooks can either be first party, or created by users (like youtube). Now the next time someone recommends a book, I can just spend an hour to learn 80% of what it has to offer rather than adding it to my never ending reading list and (maybe) get to it next month.