In tech, it’s easy to believe that product is everything. Design the right interface, ship the right features, and users will come. When I worked in the book industry, I learned the opposite lesson. We built an elegant e-book platform with smooth syncing, recommendations, and a minimal interface. It failed because it lacked the books themselves.
The bottleneck was content.
When technology runs ahead of substance
In the early 2010s, dozens of startups entered digital publishing. Each promised to “reinvent reading.” We optimized reading speed, typography, and sharing. Our code was fine, but the business model failed. Readers judged us by a simpler metric: whether they could find their next book.
We started with enthusiasm but stalled within a few months. Our catalog had gaps. Major authors were unavailable, series were missing volumes, and translations were split by rights. No amount of algorithmic work could fix this. Elegant technology doesn’t help without the right content.
Where publishers fell behind
Traditional publishers were still locked into print contracts. Electronic rights were an afterthought, buried in paper agreements from the 1990s. Clearing a single title for digital use could take months. Global rights were split between regions and languages. Every missing license created another barrier for readers.
Pirate libraries, crude and illegal, had better coverage than legal ones. Readers chose them over legal platforms because there were more books. Users valued access to the catalog more than the fancy app or the teams behind the business.
How self-publishing changed the rules
While big publishers were debating formats and DRM, self-publishing platforms filled the vacuum. Writers could publish directly without waiting for approval or print schedules. Some wrote original stories, others expanded existing worlds. Romance, fantasy, and fan fiction libraries grew quickly.
These communities operated on speed and feedback. Writers published weekly chapters, readers commented in real time, and the best stories rose through visibility. Supply met demand without corporate innovation.
For readers, these platforms replaced the empty shelf problem. For the industry, they proved that the real product wasn’t the app or the device. It was the constant flow of stories.
When technology finally helped
One project I remember fondly was the feature that linked reading and listening. You could start a book on your phone, switch to audio during a commute, and return to text at the same point.
It required months of work. We generated an artificial “fingerprint” for each audio file using text-to-speech, then aligned it with the professional recording. Users never saw this work, but the results mattered. They spent more time with books, had fewer interruptions, and remembered more of what they read.
What every digital product can learn
Every content business faces the same hierarchy:
- Rights and relationships define your ceiling.
- Features make sense only after the catalog does.
- Engagement metrics mean nothing without something worth engaging with.
Product teams often treat licensing and partnerships as support work. In reality, they are the foundation. Though many think that the user journey starts with onboarding, it actually starts with the first title they can’t find.
If you want to grow a reading app, don’t start with interface tweaks. Start with rights acquisition. If you run a video platform, invest in creators before codecs. The supply of what people come for is the real competitive advantage.
The quiet advantage of content
Technology evolves quickly, and every platform eventually adopts similar features. What truly differentiates businesses over time? Three things: how much content they have, their relationships with creators, and the habits they’ve built with their audience. These advantages take time to build, but once established, they become difficult to replicate.
I’ve seen strong teams fail without enough content, while smaller teams succeeded by keeping their catalog full. Software scales quickly, but content lasts longer.