PaperC secures its first VC round
PaperC is a platform where users can read academic books in full text, free of charge. If users purchase a page for a nominal fee of €0.10, the text can also be downloaded and printed, or worked on online. Furthermore, PaperC retails print books via the publisher’s online shop. “Looks useful for scientific/academic papers. Could well do with partnering with someone like Mendeley or Academia”, was Mike Butcher’s take after their five minute pitch at the TechCrunch Berlin event in June, 2009.
Investment director Friedemann Stier of CFH Beteiligungsgesellschaft, which manages the fund, sees the investment as a signal to book publishers that PaperC is a reliable option to market their content over the internet. Scientific book publishers like Walter de Gruyter or Oxford University Press offer thousand of books on PaperC and Stier assumes that much more publishers will now follow their trail.
The 22 year old chief developer, Lukas Rieder, says they want to become world market leader and “change the publishers’ value creation chain along the way” in an interview. Although that sounds pretty ambitious, these are not necessarily empty words.
PaperC could be a real gamechanger: Students don’t depend on their library opening hours and scientific books publishers make more money via PaperC than what they get from copyright collection societies for photocopies.