The View from our Office!
We are a small, powerful team of 25 or so software engineers, historians, editors, marketers and community managers based in Charleston, SC. We work with leading institutions around the world — finding new audiences for the historical books, maps, images, documents, sounds and moving images they digitize and curate. We were the seventh fastest growing media company in the 2012 Inc. 500 (right behind Facebook). We enjoy what we do and we do it very well. We are self-funded, profitable and optimistic about the future. We are proud to be a part of Silicon Harbor and a strong contributing member to our local tech community.
The management team of BiblioLabs didn’t exactly just wake up one day with an idea. It was more of an evolution. Although the founders all had very different backgrounds and skill sets, they were originally brought together by a common desire to see print-on-demand (POD) publishing become mainstream. The POD company they founded in 2000 was aptly named BookSurge. Notably, many of the challenges with POD publishing were similar in nature to the ones faced by BiblioLabs in that they required an automated technology solution to help bring operational efficiencies to an age-old industry.
After struggling for many years to achieve market acceptance by publishers, distributors and retailers, they reached a major milestone when BookSurge was acquired by Amazon.com in 2005 to broaden its catalog of offerings. POD and web retailing go hand in hand because neither have limited shelf space, yet by the same token, neither want to carry inventory. The technology was successfully integrated by Amazon, who now sells millions of books to customers all over the world through Amazon print-on-demand.
The work we are doing with BiblioLabs is disruptive and important and we are thrilled to still be at the heart of the new global publishing paradigm.
