In December of 2023, Leo and Theo reached out to me wanting to tell me about a new idea they had been working on. We sat down for a quick meeting and after some convincing started to work on a concept that will be presented in this article. Here is how it all started.

So the problem was simple; students our age pay way to much for student literature they only use for a short period of time. Professors like to switch up which editions of a book is used, rendering the already purchased books useless. In addition, traveling with loads and loads of books isn’t healthy with the additional weight they impose to our bags.

We started arranging interviews with Swedens major book publishers, and when asked about why digitalization of student literature hasn’t happened yet, the answer was always:

There will definetly be a digitalization soon, but right now, we like the position we are in. Our revenue is good, and we don’t see a stable economic model where us publishers and the writers get equal economic compensation when going digital.

At the same time, we wanted to get an image of what would be needed for students to consider switching to digital library of coursebooks. Here, the answers were not so surprising:

• “I like to be able to highlight and take notes in my books”
• “If my coursebook is digital, I might as well ask an LLM to summarize it for me”
• “The big win with having it digital is that I can search the book for relevant terms”
• “I’m afraid that when purchasing or viewing a digital book, that it isn’t the same as the professor suggested”

Working on a concept

We started working at Minc in order to quickly build up a concept that could be shown to publishers and students alike. In addition to being a regular book reader, our platform would incorporate the following:

• Deep search of books: Using the book as context for an LLM, the user could search for book concepts indirectly and still get relevant results
• Flash cards and tests based on book content that ease on learning the contents
• Citation generator for highlighted text in the book viewer

We showed of the following prototype in our final weeks at Minc, receiving positive reactions from book publishers such as Liber and Natur och Kultur. Here is the concept:

Thanks to Leonardo Ljoljo and Theo Morales for the great work and invitation to Minc!