Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column looks at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.

An ancient and once-sacred bond between author and audience, reading and writing have become but two more tasks along with a multitude of other things that we do on a host of digital devices — watcing videos, listening to music, playing games, and really anything except using Facebook Home. Still, there are some for whom the intimate act of interface between pen and paper retains more magic than all the electrons powering all the devices in the world have not been able to recreate. For them, a trio of European crowdfunding projects have trotted out a range of products to improve both endpoints of analog document creation.

Whacked: LazyPete. Arrgh! Listen up, ye scurvy dogs, as I tell ye the legend of Lazy Pete, a pirate so wrapped up in his romance novels that he didn’t see a great white shark leap from the ocean to leave him with just one hand. ‘Tis in Lazy Pete’s honor that Philip Musche surely named his one-handed book reading contraption, which essentially puts one of those book stands that keep pages open on a beefy handle. Despite showing off the reading aid in nearly enough colors to cover the Seven Seas, Musche failed to capture enough crowdfunding booty, and the campaign ended with only £533 of the desired £30,000 treasure.

Backed: Idae. What the GoPro is to most digital cameras, Idae is to most pocket journals, even the durable Field Notes. The waterproof, tear-resistant notebook is just the thing for when you need to make that critical addition to your grocery shopping list in the middle of your next scuba dive, and a perfect match for your Fisher Space Pen. And if you needed any more proof of just how extreme it is, it has a hole for a carabiner.

That said, fire will consume it along with the haiku you were inspired to write on the slopes. And if you’re not planning to keep your notes around indefinitely, the notebook can be recycled. Developed in Milan and shipped to backers last month for between $20 and $30 depending on cover color, the 32-page thought preserver cleared its $7,200 funding goal with a couple of hundred dollars to spare, but you’d expect that kind of nail-biting excitement from such a tough guy.

Backed: Meteor Grip. The pencil has been thin enough to serve as a benchmark against which to compare high-tech electronics. While it’s comfortable for many, at least for short periods, it can be difficult to grasp for some. Receiving inspiration when his partner Zoë, a tattoo artist, began suffering hand pain in December 2011, Pontefract, UK-based Jai Dickerson Pierce developed the Meteor Grip. Few details are provided about what material is used to create the grip. Rather, the key to its uniqueness is being available in both right and left-handed versions. As the campaign page employs double negatives to claim, “No other manufacturer produces an ergonomic hand grip that is not ambidextrous.”

That said, the campaign is not above covering a spectrum of uses, claiming that the product is useful as a novelty gift while also proclaiming that it is “changing the writing experience forever.” Not yet changed for kiddies, though, as a potential meteorite grip is for now on the drawing board. With a bit over three weeks left to go, the Meteor Grip has collected about a quarter of its humble £875 goal. Seven pounds will marry your love of astronomy with hatred of thin writing tools, and ten pounds can get one for you as well as the cramping tattoo artist in your life as soon as this month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Reading app Readability once butted heads with Apple on subscription rules, but more recently its friction points have been in competition with apps like Instapaper, Pocket, Pulse, and Flipboard, who all present consumers with ways of aggregating and making it easier to read the vast sea of content available online. Now Readability, with has 5 million monthly active users stripping out and reading tens of millions of articles each day, is launching Top Reads, a reading aggregation service of its own based on the most read stories on Readability, to get more people to spend more time on its platform.

Top Reads will launch first as a responsive web app for desktop and mobile screens, and Rich Ziade, one of Readability’s founders, says that there will be dedicated native mobile apps on the way in a matter of months if the response is good.

Top Reads is not exactly new — it a feature that first appeared as a list in Readability’s mobile app last year, and has been getting strong traffic since, with about two-thirds of the site’s 5 million users using it every month. Enough attention, he said, to get Ziade and his team to explore making it into a standalone service with its own URL.

“Discovery is a still big deal,” he told TechCrunch. “We’re getting swamped with stuff to read.” And while his app has developed a dedicated audience using it to read content they are finding themselves, this will help them look at what others are reading, too.

The new, more visual version looks more like Flipboard than text river, with pictures and links through to either read later, share, or read instantly.

One of the early proponents of social search and part of Google’s social team has left the company, and he has a big reading list ahead of him. Max Ventilla, co-founder of early social search company Aardvark and recent member of the Google+ team, had his last day at Google yesterday. And given the content of the books he’s reading, we can probably expect him to start something new in the education sector.

My husband's last day at Google was yesterday. Can you guess what his latest obsession is? http://t.co/gKg97uk3pe—
Jenny Stefanotti (@developingjen) April 03, 2013

Ventilla is a two-time entrepreneur who sold his last company, Aardvark, to Google. He was early in the social search game, founding Aardvark in 2007 and raising $7.5 million in a round led by August Capital. Aardvark was a social search application with a strong location-based component. The app presented users with a chat-like interface that allowed them to ask questions to self-described topic experts and everybody in their social graph.

The departure comes three years after Google acquired Aardvark and about a year-and-a-half after the service was shut down. Since then, Ventilla has been working on Google+ as a senior product manager, helping the search giant build its own social network. He’s also been an active angel investor, writing checks for startups such as Wavii, Apportable, Trulia, Trickplay, Good Eggs, Broadstreet Analytics, Lux Dulux, and Golocal, among others.

While it’s not clear what Ventilla’s next move is, it’s clear that education is a big focus for the entrepreneur. With titles like “How Children Succeed” and “Redesigning Accountability Systems For Education” on his reading list, we can expect him to maybe build something to help improve our education system as part of his next project. Or at least maybe help advise a startup that is doing that.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Michael Shapiro isn’t the sort of person I’d expect to circumvent the gatekeepers of traditional journalism. He’s a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, and he said he’s been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and Sports Illustrated — in other other words, he seems to be on pretty good terms with those gatekeepers.

Yet Shapiro is launching a new journalism startup called The Big Roundtable. The reason? He said that there are a lot of untested assumptions in the journalism world. As a parallel, he pointed to book publishing, where he said it was long believed that “black people don’t buy books.” There was, in fact, “this whole sub rosa world” of independent black book stores, with its own bestsellers like Iceberg Slim‘s Pimp: The Story Of My Life. Yet traditional publishers had no idea that world existed until the mainstream success of writers like Terry McMillan in the 1990s.

Similarly, Shapiro isn’t criticizing any particular editor, but he said that submitting to the shrinking number of magazines that support long-form journalism means subjecting yourself to the taste of individual editors. He said he’s often asked by students and colleagues whether the New Yorker or a similar magazine might be interested in a particular story: “The answer is probably not. This is not the era in which I came of age.”

The web has spawned new venues for selling that long-form journalism, like the Atavist, Byliner, and Amazon’s Kindle Singles program, but Shapiro said they’re still applying the same editorial model. With The Big Roundtable, he hopes to do things differently. Shapiro has assembled a group of 50 readers, who are supposed to vet the stories. The first 1,000 words of each submission gets sent to a subset of those readers, who are then asked whether they’d read more. (That’s all they’re asked — Shapiro said that in earlier versions of the system, readers offered more detailed feedback, but “it felt like homework” and “it quickly devolved into workshopping — you know, ‘I wouldn’t choose a semicolon here.’”)

If someone in that first group likes the excerpt, then it’s passed to a second group, and if someone likes it there, only then does an editor — specifically Mike Hoyt, executive editor of the Columbia Journalism review — start working with the author. Ultimately, Shapiro plans to sell a new nonfiction novella on the site every week, and the writer will get $1 from each sale.

Hopefully, this will allow The Big Roundtable to find work that didn’t catch the attention of particular editors but will still resonate with some readers. In that vein, Shapiro is looking for finished pieces rather than commissioning articles in its advance — this should be a story that you had to write, and you just haven’t found a home for it.

“If you’re going to say, ‘Well, I don’t know, I want to take my idea to some place where they can pay in advance,’ my response is: Go with God,” Shapiro said.

He also said he wants to expand the reading group from 50 people to “hundreds”, with a broad set of tastes and experiences, but Shapiro emphasized that it’s not quite the same thing as crowdsourcing.

“The thing about crowdsourcing is, it’s a crowd,” he said. “By its very nature it’s a huge, undifferentiated bunch of people.”

To illustrate his point, he pointed to the Literary Digest, a magazine that, in 1936, polled millions of people and as a result predicted that Alfred Landon would beat Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the presidential election — which was very, very wrong. Shapiro’s point: That it’s less important to have an enormous group of readers, and more important to make sure that it’s the right mix. Put another way, Shapiro is emulating the Algonquin Round Table (a famous group of writers) and “scaling it out intellectually.”

To help fund The Big Roundatble’s costs, Shapiro has been raising money on Kickstarter. He recently passed his $5,000 target, but he said he deliberately set the goal low to make sure that he would meet it. He’s hoping to raise more money, which would presumably support The Big Roundtable for a longer period of time and allow it to get a little more ambitious. Shapiro said he’s going to be exploring other funding options, too.

“I’ll be looking at things like grants or investors to establish a real, ongoing laboratory, a laboratory in which … this is all to be shared,” Shapiro said. “I’m welcoming competition. If this spawns more digital publishing ventures based upon our knowledge, then I will believe that we are succeeding.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The first — and still, the only — 4G network in the U.K. is now available to half the U.K.’s homes and businesses. Carrier EE said today it has switched on the network in 13 more towns and cities to hit the 50% population coverage mark five months after the network went live.

The company has previously said its network rollout would reach 55% of the population by June, and is claiming it has speeded up this schedule. Today’s launch switches 4G on in Bradford, Bingley, Doncaster, Dudley, Harpenden, Leicester, Lichfield, Loughborough, Luton, Reading, Shipley, St Albans and West Bromwich, with another 30 towns and cities due to go live by the end of June bringing the total covered by the 4GEE rollout to 80.

The PR exercise of being able to trumpet that a majority of the U.K. population is now covered by its 4G coverage is important for EE as it needs to make the most of its head start over rivals O2, Vodafone and Three. They have all now secured the 4G-suitable spectrum they needed to start building their own 4G networks, although the smallest carrier, Three, appears to be in no rush — with CEO Dave Dyson telling Mobile News yesterday: “We’re in no rush to launch LTE. First we’ll see how 4G is positioned by O2 and Vodafone and look at how we position it. I’m fairly relaxed about it.”

At the end of the auction process last month, O2 said it anticipated a “summer 4G launch”, while Vodafone was less specific on its rollout schedule, saying only that it would launch a 4G network “later this year”.

Having a 4G head start hasn’t brought huge customer wins for EE yet. Last month it reported total 3G and 4G postpaid additions in Q4 of 201,000 – down from 250,000 postpaid net adds in Q3, and 313,000 in the year ago quarter, suggesting any benefit from being first to 4G has yet to be realised. Part of the issue is that postpaid customers are typically locked into contracts — of up to two years in duration — with little choice but to wait until the contract ends before switching providers. By which time EE’s rivals could have their own 4G networks up and running so building out coverage is key to winning the looming 4G marketing battle.

Carrier coverage claims are always an abstraction of a far more complex on the ground reality. Rollouts typically focus on switching on cell towers in a city or town centre where population density tends to be highest, and gradually expanding coverage from there — so even the 50 towns and cities that EE claims to have ‘switched on’ are unlikely to enjoy full 4G coverage right from the city limits to the centre. We’ve reached out to EE to ask for details of the proportion of towns and cities covered in its rollout and will update this story with any response.

The problem of getting accurate data for cellular coverage maps is being tackled by crowdsourced coverage startup OpenSignal.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Barnes & Noble content and tablet subsidiary Nook Media, part-owned by Microsoft specifically to help boost content for its new Windows 8 platform, today put some of that strategy into action: it has announced that people who download the Nook app for Windows 8 will get five books and five magazines free of charge.

This is in addition to the company’s existing list of free books from its back catalog, similar to what Amazon offers on the Kindle. The Nook store currently stocks over 3 million books, comics and other reading material, which includes 1 million free books.

B&N says it is creating a “select list” of free books from which to choose, which will include bestsellers like Best American Series 2012, Blue Bloods, Hello, Cupcake!, Life of Pi and The Enemy, as well as popular magazines like GQ, Real Simple and TIME.

Somewhat annoyingly, B&N is setting up some parameters for people to take up the offer quickly. For example, Life of Pi is only available to the first 100,000 customers who download the book on the NOOK app for Windows 8. A little lame considering we’re talking here about a digital asset, not a pre-printed copy of the book, which theoretically should not “sell out.”

The deal puts a closer link between B&N and Microsoft, something the two had already been fostering through their JV and development initiatives. This includes giving users the ability to pay for items on the Nook store using their Microsoft accounts.

“NOOK is the highest-rated reading and digital bookstore app for Windows 8, and by providing bestselling books and top magazines for free, new NOOK customers can start their digital libraries with some of the best content in the expansive NOOK Store,” said Jamie Iannone, President of Digital Products at NOOK Media LLC. “With the NOOK app for Windows 8, customers get an incredible reading experience and can choose from over 3 million NOOK Books, including 1 million free titles, as well as magazines, newspapers and comics on any Windows 8 device.”

Indeed, the deal will sweeten the deal for people considering whether or not to buy Windows 8-based tablets, which reports claim have so far not been selling as well as people had hoped they would. But at the same time, it’s a way for B&N to grow its own base of users, who will hopefully return to the app to buy books once their free offer has ended.

The move comes on the heels of other free offers created by B&N as it scrambles to beef up user numbers and sales after a poor quarter, where Nook sales were down by 28%. That has included offering users a free lower-end version of the Nook, the Nook Simple, with every purchase of a Nook HD+.

There was one silver lining in those results: while device sales were not meeting expectations, digital content grew by 13%. This is where books could help save the day for B&N’s digital business.

B&N also plans to enhance those services in the weeks ahead with the launch of in-app purchases, which will finally put it in line with offerings from other purveyors of apps like Apple, Google, and, specifically, its arch nemesis in the books category, Amazon.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Bookboard, a subscription service for children’s books, has launched its iPad app, which gives parents and children streaming access to its library of books. Like many kids apps startups, three former Adobe employees, Mike Fitzpatrick, Nigel Pegg, and Fang Chang, founded the company out of personal needs as parents. They came together to develop a service that encourages and develops a child’s love of reading.

Bookboard’s library includes more than 300 books targeted at children ages 2-7. Parents can set up individual profiles for each child, track progress, and adjust the reading difficulty of books.

According to Pegg, who is the CTO, the overarching goal for the company is “What can Bookboard do to motivate kids to spend more time reading?” That ends up driving many of its design decisions, particularly incorporating game dynamics into the app. As kids get older and the system detects changing interests, the app adapts to the growing child.

Bookboard’s secret sauce comes from its librarian Cen Campbell, who defines and applies library organization guidelines to the collection, including classifications, metadata, and reading level assessment. With metadata on hand, the system can tackle two big data problems: 1) unlock relevant “next books to read” and 2) apply collaborate filtering techniques to recommend books.

Unlocking Books – Incorporating Game Dynamics To Motivate

A prevailing psychological theory, “the tyranny of choice,” argues that when provided with too many choices, people feel overwhelmed and overloaded and are, as a result, unlikely to pursue any of the options available. In building out the product, the Bookboard team encountered their big aha moment when they discovered that progressive unlocking was the key to driving engagement of the service. In the beginning, the app presented the entire library to kids. The team noted that the ratio of time spent browsing titles to time spent was too high.

Then the team introduced artificial scarcity into the initial set of books that kids could choose from. Kids are motivated to make it through books to see what will come next. The unlocking of more choices over time serves as a reward mechanism. As a result, the time spent reading, as opposed to browsing titles, is now the bulk of time spent within the app. When a book is earned via unlocking, it is read over 75 percent of the time.

As kids progress in the app, they are presented with more book choices. Half of the selections are based on interest matching by looking at subject, characters, genre and theme. Then the rest are generated using collaborative filtering techniques to determine whether “other kids who completed this book also completed that book.”

Challenges Ahead

The service currently does not include bestselling children’s books or Caldecott winners that parents look for. Nor do they have familiar character books like Sesame Street’s Elmo or classics like “Goodnight Moon.” To address this, Bookboard struck content partnerships with Peachtree Publishers and Open Road Integrated Media, a deal that will add popular children’s titles such as the Berenstain Bears and Boxcar Children series to Bookboard’s catalog. While these partnerships will remedy that in the long run, the question remains, does the service provide sufficiently engaging content for parents and children to keep them coming back for more?

I had a chance to try out Bookboard with my sons (ages 2 and 5) in the past week. The company has really identified something to keep my kids engaged and motivated, which makes Bookboard stand out among the countless ebook services in the market.

There are two plans to choose from: $29.94 for a six-month subscription, or $8.99 per month. The company also offers a free trial. The app is available now for the iPad. Desktop and Android devices are forthcoming.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Chegg has long been known as a textbook company, becoming one of the first companies to bring textbook rental online and reach widespread adoption. But with Amazon, Apple and others moving aggressively into the textbook market — and the market and textbooks themselves increasingly going digital — Chegg has been re-positioning. Today, the textbook company is eying EdTech’s Holy Grail of becoming the OS for students (or in their words, a student’s academic hub), a big change for a company that launched behind the Textbookflix.com URL back in 2005.

This means the company has been adding course reviews and planners, scholarship help, course search and tutoring, as it expands to offer a wider range of student services. On the other hand, CTO Chuck Geiger tells us, those services have little value if students can’t access them across platforms. So, Chegg has been on a mission to provide that access to its services at any time, on smartphones, tablets laptops and every platform in between.

It’s already launched “Chegg Flashcards” and its original app, which allows students to rent, search for and purchase digital textbooks. Today, Chegg launched a new app for iOS called Chegg Textbook Solutions, which aims to help students solve those tricky textbook problems. The new app includes over 2.5 million step-by-step textbook solutions from over 2,000 popular college textbooks and allows students to search book-by-book and chapter-to-chapter for the content they need.

The idea is to let students learn at their own pace, going through the process one step at a time, and if they run into hurdles, to ask the community for help. Students can also rate and suggest corrections, rating solutions from 1 to 5 stars. The company, which says that it now reaches 30 percent of college students on 7K campuses across the country, is offering the new textbook app for free. However, the full service itself will only be free for 30 days. After that, it will cost $14.95.

The real benefit of Textbook Solutions is that the app acts like a companion to students’ regular textbooks and offers the kind of answer guide that teachers usually get access to but students don’t. But, more importantly, Geiger says, the solution isn’t there to just give students the answers outright, the app aims to help them understand how to arrive at the correct answer. Plus, it has that interactive element by allowing students to reach out to the community to ask questions when they get stuck.

The company is also updating its original, flagship app today, which allows students to use the their phone’s camera to scan ISBN numbers, QR codes, enter the title, author to search for and find text (and textbooks). Textbook Solutions for iOS includes this search functionality, too, though the new app focuses on problem sets, while Chegg’s original, eponymous app lets students read eTextbooks on the go and helps them save money with price comparisons and extended purchase options.

Today, the CTO tells us, Chegg’s demographics still skew more towards higher ed, but as the company has grown, it’s been seeing a larger portion of its user base made up of high school students. It still makes the majority of its revenue from students buying and renting textbooks, but, again, through its acquisitions of Zinch, 3D3R and CourseRank (to name a few), it’s been slowly diversifying.

The company continues to show today that the focus there is really on mobile, as the company’s mobile traffic doubled over the last year and its mobile orders (from its flagship app) have increased 80 percent year-over-year. In 2012, Geiger added, one in four of Chegg eReader sessions was on mobile.

As such, Chegg has smartly committed to the goal of becoming a real eCommerce portal for high school and college students — on the Web and on mobile — where it sees huge potential. With the value of academic content decreasing as it moves to the web and digital devices, Chegg can still benefit handsomely from becoming the intermediary or middle man in the digital content game between students and publishers.

“We’re not interested in commoditizing content,” Geiger says, “but we have relationships with millions of students who have credit cards. eCommerce’s ability to allow microtransactions for ‘micro-content’ purchases is huge. If we can offer the best content from a wide range of sources, we’ll be well-positioned.”

As of now, the company has been looking to make strides in the user experience of reading textbooks online and on your tablet. Chegg launched its popular eReader HTML5 app a year ago and has developed several patents for the techniques it uses to cache content on a mobile browser.

Of course, with its new native app, students don’t have to worry about as many caching restrictions or slow rendering. Going forward, Chegg will look to take more advantage of living natively on student devices. It’s been more concerned with cross-platform compatibility up to this point, but by making more use of a phone’s GPS, for example, Chegg can begin to offer a realtime, high-res campus map students can access at the beginning of the term or school year. Anything that enables the company to offer more digital products and services to students at a faster pace is a good thing, the CTO says.

In the future, look for Chegg to begin experimenting more with the personalization of learning content as well. The topic has become a hot one in edtech communities over the last year, and even the big publishers like McGraw-Hill have jumped headlong into the game. Chegg already offers personalized scholarship services, and the “best” content from “The Big Four” publishers (McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Cengage and Wiley), but with its growing access to students on mobile devices — especially during their reading experience — there are a lot more opportunities for Chegg to make the learning process better.

The company’s mission is now to “to save students time, money and get them smarter.” You’ll notice there’s no longer any mention of textbooks in that mission statement, but if Chegg really hopes to follow-through with the first and third parts of that statement, it will need to keep pushing forward here. By expanding its services, it’s begun to allow itself to make money beyond the times of year when students are buying textbooks, but really this should be about the student — and student outcomes. And while a textbook answer key is sure to pique their interest, adaptive learning technologies (when done right) can ensure that personalization becomes part of the Chegg experience.

For more, find Chegg’s announcement here, and a video intro to Textbook Solutions below:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There’s no shortage of apps on Android that offer to read news feeds out loud — Google’s mobile OS includes built-in text-to-speech (TTS) functionality, making it a snip for devs to add speech-related features. But the problem is that a lot of these TTS-powered apps do a poor job of deciphering the main content on a web page versus all of the other superfluous text. That’s where Web2go, an Android app from Israeli startup Volacent, claims to have got the experience right with technology it’s calling ARI (Artificial Reading Intelligence) that uses pattern matching to work out what text on a web page is and isn’t relevant.

The otherwise barebones and free app offers a directory of Web2go-enabled news sites — around 170 but with more being added daily — which users pick from and pin to one of the available slots on the app’s home screen. Initially, only four slots are available, but in an unapologetic bid to go viral, more can be unlocked by sharing the app with friends. Using a radio station analogy, users then tap on one of their saved news stations to begin having Web2go read its content out loud. A swipe skips to the next article, and so on.

Along with being smart enough to read only the meaningful text from articles, ignoring things like navigation text, menu items, ads, and captions (and, rather bluntly, any text in parentheses), Volacent says that its text-to-speech engine, which I’m told is powered by NeoSpeech, makes it stand out from competitors with a higher-quality and more human-like voice. That may be the case, though I still found it quite fatiguing to listen to for any length of time, but you might be more forgiving.

The app also supports Mono and A2DP Bluetooth for connection to car hands-free speaker systems and the like, which makes perfect sense given that listening to the news is already part of many people’s daily commute.

CEO and co-founder Shahar Karni tells me that the inspiration for Web2go came when a family member was diagnosed with eye cancer, requiring a period of radiation treatment that meant that they were unable to use both eyes for a month. Thus a search began for an application that would ‘read’ their favorite news sites and blogs, but that search fell short as the apps available often had poor voice quality and “didn’t read the articles in a way you can actually understand”, says Karni. He then saw an opportunity to develop an app for visually impaired people, although obviously the market for something like Web2go is much broader.

To that end, the app is free to download and use, though Karni says monetization could come in the form of “voice commercials” with a revenue share offered to publishers. Meanwhile, a version of Web2go for iOS is said to be “coming soon”.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

One of the most valuable things parents can do is read to their kids, but keeping a steady supply of quality books in the house is still a challenge. Today, a startup called The Little Book Club is launching to address that problem with a subscription-based service for kids’ books. The service, designed for busy parents who can’t stomach the idea of reading “Goodnight Moon” every night for the next five years, offers an age-appropriate selection of educational books shipped monthly, centered around different themes.

Targeted at parents with children under six years old, each package includes three books or two books and a related, educational activity, like a puzzle or workbook, for example. The cost is $24.95 per month and shipping is free. The books’ themes might be something like “colors” or “dinosaurs,” to give you an idea.

During its private friends and family beta test, the company had 50 users on the service, who each received a monthly selection from The Little Book Club’s over 200 books. The books aren’t chosen at random, but are picked based on the age of the child and the current theme. The selection includes books approved by the National Education Association, the American Library Association, those that have won the Caldecott Medal, those are popular best-sellers or new classics (like those on NYT’s best sellers list, for instance), and more.

The company was founded by Doug Ludlow, previously the CEO of Hipster, and now Aol Ventures’ first innovation partner (disclose: TechCrunch is owned by Aol), and his wife, Sara, an OBGYN. Their interest in creating The Little Book Club comes from their own experiences as parents to a four-year old girl and 15-month old boy, the founders tell me.

“What we enjoyed most as a family was sitting down and reading – doing story night,” says Ludlow. “We realized that’s something everyone likes to do, but it’s also something everyone has a problem with. Everyone wants to read their kids books, and expose their kids to literature, but it’s often hard to get a new supply of books coming in,” he explains.

As a parent myself, it’s easy to see the appeal in a set-it-and-forget type of service like this, but committing to spending hundreds of dollars per year for brand-new books is a challenge, especially when most of our book collection comes from gifts, hand-me-downs, and local second-hand stores like Goodwill. Plus, our school likes to send home those Scholastic flyers which has the benefit of giving back to the classroom with each purchase.

But Sara says that even Scholastic is often too time-consuming for parents. “You actually have to fill out that order form,” she notes. “The nice thing about The Little Book Club is it just shows up at your house. You don’t have to worry about turning stuff in or writing a check. There’s a convenience there.”

Besides, The Little Book Club makes a great gift (hint, hint grandparents). In fact, the founders tell me that a quarter of their beta testers are sending the books as gifts to someone else. (My own beta test went well, for what it’s worth).

The Little Book Club has another interesting aspect worth mentioning, too – it offers to handle book donations for those your kids have outgrown. You can contact the company and it will send you an envelope which you can use to donate your used books to foster children. It will also send you a tax-deductible receipt for those donations. You can’t beat that.

The Little Book Club is live now, and sign up is here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch