Bibliotech’s proposition was driven by the realisation that the supply of textbooks is space and cost constrained within academic institutions and students who can generally only afford a selection of those resort to borrowing or downloading titles. An online solution which could provide access to a wider range of textbooks would not only address the issue but would also offer the potential to supply the information across multiple devices and to enable enhanced search and other tools to make the process more efficient.

After building a significant reader base with its early B2C offering the company realised that this would generate a large dataset of users’ reading and search habits. This information was recognised as potentially valuable to textbook publishers.