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BookShout is a technology operating company founded in 2010 by Jason Illian in the Book Publishing Industry with offices in Dallas, TX and New York City, and backed by John Ingram of Ingram Publishing. It hosts over 1 million eBook files in its catalog and works with over 1,000 publishers including Chronicle Books, Hachette Publishing Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Penguin Random House, Perseus, Simon & Schuster, Wiley, and Workman.
BookShout is the largest provider of bulk eBook sales in the world and has partnered with numerous corporations to provide them with digital content such as, CareerBuilder, Dr. Ben Carson,CBS’ How I Met Your Mother, Cisco, the Hearst Corporation, Intel, and Microsoft. BookShout has also partnered with South by Southwest (SXSW) to provide all eBook content for the 2015 event.
BookShout's eReader technology works on Android devices, iPads, iPhones, Kindle Fire HD, Nook HD/HD+, and the web. BookShout reports to The New York Times Best Seller List and has a proprietary digital rights management (DRM) scheme.
The company raised $6 million in Series B funding in 2013.
Reception
As noted above, BookShout has received a favorable reception amongst publishers, media companies, authors, and investors. In August 2013, Nate Hoffelder of The Digital Reader - who assessed BookShout from multiple points of view - gave BookShout's offerings a mixed review. From the end user's perspective, he notes: BookShout does not allow the end user to redeem ebooks "through the Kindle, Nook, and other ebookstores" as Livrada can. "But I would think BookShout would rather that you didn't notice such details and instead focus on their partners".
On the other hand, when taking the perspective of industry insiders, he observed:
But in spite of the lack of support for the major ebookstores, BookShout does have at least one card up its sleeve. Their platform is focused more in giving the author/publisher more control. It's a white-label solution, and for example BookShout offers partners the option of branded redemption pages [...]. That type of branding can be worth a lot.
In autumn 2014, members of MobileRead (an "online community dedicated to the exchange of ideas and information relating to all aspects of the Mobile Internet boom"), when presented with BookShout's offer of "A Free eBook for You", unleashed a barrage of criticisms, including the inability to access or back up content acquired via BookShout outside of BookShout's proprietary app or webviewer (echoing many of the concerns K.T. Bradford noted in the DigitalTrends article "5 reasons to liberate your ebooks from their DRM prison"), or to read on an E-ink reader or the original Kindle Fire.