Holloway Is Building A New Way To Publish Books Online

No one could have predicted where the information age would lead us. We don’t know what to believe and it’s only getting worse with the emergence of deep fakes. We have access to more information than we ever could have foreseen, but our tools are rudimentary and it’s tough to navigate it all.

Holloway wants to change the way knowledge is published and shared. As other old media industries have collapsed or declined in dramatic fashion, the book industry has remained surprisingly stable. And in those intervening years, we have begun to consume smaller chunks of information online through blogs.

Holloway wants to synthesize the way we search for information online with the authority of published books. If this sounds nuanced, that’s because it is. I spoke to co-founder and CEO Andy Sparks about the intersection of technology and legacy industries, the ongoing need for in-depth content in the age of audio storytelling, and the value of a substantiated opinion.

The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

What problem are you solving?

Andy Sparks: The problem is that books contain the best knowledge people create, but it’s actually really hard to find. Take Google for example. Sergey Brin said, “the highest-quality knowledge is captured in books,” but the content inside of books rarely shows up on the search results page. Just try typing “how to start a business,” into Google. Not a single book, despite hundreds having been written, shows up. Whether it's nonfiction or fiction, books are full of all kinds of good stuff that someone has spent years of their lives making. And it’s not actually searchable on the internet. 

In his book, The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly, of Wired magazine talked about “unbundling books,” which means that books don’t have to be read from front-to-back, maybe there’s something so good in chapter two that you just want to start in the middle. Today, if you wrote a book on how to become a writer, and chapter two was on outlining, and someone went to Google and typed in, “how to create,” or “how to write a great outline,” your book, no matter how good it is, wouldn’t show up as a search result. Even though it might be one of the most helpful things. This is what we want to fix. 

Didn’t Google Books try to address this pain point?

Andy Sparks: So Google Books has a whole wide history. From roughly 2005-2017, there was a giant legal battle between the book industry and Google. The book industry argued that Google was violating copyright law by showing previews of books online.

In 2016, the Supreme Court sided with Google. Google now hosts a ton of previews of scanned book pages, but this is as if YouTube was just videos of people recording their TVs with their iPhones — the content hasn’t been adapted for the web.

In 2017, Wired ran a piece that said Google books had two problems: first, the copyright thing, which is less of a problem now, and second, the project lost its drive and ambition. While Google Books’ library has grown since 2017, it’s still missing a ton of books and the experience feels very archaic compared to reading say, The New York Times.

Right, so it would be as if Spotify only had recordings from the 1920s.

Andy Sparks: Exactly, exactly. And selected recordings from the last 50 years. It would be as as if you went to The New York Times’ website and it was just scanned editions of their newspaper — not a satisfactory digital experience. 

Is your product the content you’re actually publishing or the platform you’re publishing it on?

Andy Sparks: The platform. Roughly 5-10 years from now, we hope most independent authors, and authors that have another book publisher, will be publishing their digital content with Holloway. They'll be publishing it with Holloway because they'll be able to reach a much larger audience.

Their content will be published on web pages, as opposed to just in a closed ecosystem where readers can’t take advantage of search as a distribution engine. They won’t just be able to search and share snippets of pages. How do we get there?

We just said, “Well, why don't we write some of our own to start out with, and let's write some of our own that shows up in search. And let's just learn from there.” And as we started to learn more, we asked, “Why haven't book publishers done this?”

There are two main reasons they haven't done it. One, the book publishing industry hasn't taken a nosedive in sales, like magazines and newspapers have. So we’ve seen magazines and newspapers go straight down, but book publishers have basically been flat. Everyone that was making money 20 years ago is still making money today.

I know when Amazon first went up against the publishing industry, it was super cutthroat on both sides.

Andy Sparks: So that's one reason, but publishers need to decide whether they want to make a $10-$20 million bet on technology, which is outside of what they're good at. No book publishers have decided to make that bet yet. The closest thing we’ve seen is O'Reilly.

Or maybe someone else who realizes it doesn’t want to cannibalize their own business, right? It's sort of like Disney+ where you have to have strong conviction to do it right.

Andy Sparks: So to answer your question, to bring it all the way back, we said, “Alright, if we want to go after this, we need to go create three or five examples of this. We need to prove that it works. We need to prove that we can take something that is book-length, and publish it on a bunch of webpages to provide a concrete example of what this looks like. By the way, we have a guide on equity compensation, it's totally free to dive in a little bit. Then if you Google the term taxes or equity compensation there’s a page that's like chapter six of that guide. And so the whole thing is right there. And it says the Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation. So you can see that it's there. And if it's a paid guide, you can imagine in the future, we'd say, you know, you've gotten two sections for free, it's time that you pay.”

Sounds like you’re creating original content first. Sort of like a reverse Netflix?

Andy Sparks: That's exactly right. We use that metaphor sometimes. We're doing the opposite of Netflix and in 2020, we’re going to work with independent authors. So we've already gotten enough proof to start speaking with some independent authors who haven't got, you know, a book deal yet. And we said, “Hey, we can take all your content, we can do this.” We show them what we did with equity compensation and say, “We can do that with your content. We can make it paid and we can give you a cut. You can also share every single page individually and update the content after you publish it.” We haven't signed any authors yet. We literally just started to be very serious about this a few weeks ago.

You're obviously a technology company, but do you identify as a publisher first and foremost?

Andy Sparks: Every time we get this question, it kind of makes me throw up inside.

In a post-WeWork world, I can understand why.

Andy Sparks: We think of ourselves as both a technology company and publishing company. I mean, long-term, we're building the technology infrastructure to publish books on the internet, which are really web pages in web browsers. You can do so much with them in terms of adding tests to make sure that people retain the knowledge they're learning. We just haven't.

That's what we want to do with the technology but we have to be a publishing company and understand all of the intricacies of what makes a good book. We have to understand pedagogy. We have to understand all this stuff. It's not just technology, but we will forever have a publishing arm. 

Feels like we’re still in the afterglow of Peak Podcast. With popular companies like Blinkist, providing high-level book summaries via audio, what role do you see books having in the future?

Andy Sparks: Like food, there will always be a cheap and easy way to eat in five minutes and there will always be a market for food that you can sit down and eat over six hours, and have a 10-course meal with expensive wine. It's just two different things. Not everyone wants food you can eat in five minutes, not everyone wants the other thing. I think that some knowledge requires you to study it.

So if you just want to read a summary of a book because you want to have a conversation at dinner about Sapiens, fine. But if you are a product marketer and you need to go learn everything about product marketing, or editing or whatever, you need to study the material. Studying the material comes by understanding all the details and nuance so you can be an expert.

As we’re talking I keep thinking of Encyclopedia Britannica, but you’re explicitly not a Wikipedia competitor, are you?

Andy Sparks: That's such a good question because we started with Wikipedia in mind, specifically not trying to be Wikipedia. But if you look at Wikipedia, our favorite way to think about this is, imagine you're in a library. You walk into a library and every single section of the library represents a different knowledge product. The encyclopedia, the dictionary, the biography. They're all technically books, but they are different. They have very specific roles to play. The encyclopedia has rules. A biography has rules.

Wikipedia is the next instance of the encyclopedia. One of the rules of the encyclopedia is there's no room for opinion. It's consensus fact. It's what we all agree to be true — without getting into what truth is. And so with Holloway, there's a ton of room for opinion. It's just expert opinion because that's what people want to know. They want to know what an expert thinks, but if you punch in an opinion into Wikipedia, they strike it from the record. But that sort of trust is really what people respond to ultimately. It just has to be qualified.

We want people to know that Holloway is a place they can trust for this type of thing.

Key Takeaways

• Most, if not all, innovation sits at the intersection of an old industry and technology, but all we have are cliche marketing terms to articulate this. We can do better.
• Even though the audio boom has drawn attention in recent years, there will likely always be a market for in-depth reading materials.
• Consensus fact has an essential role, but a verified opinion is what humans want most. We want someone who knows better than us to tell us what makes the most sense.