Is your attention span less than that of a goldfish? This app could help you read

Photo credit: Cloud2013

True to the nature of his product, Gaurav Gupta sends me a mail minutes after we speak. It is a summary of our conversation – and you’ll soon know why.

At 40, the former head of data marketing at Tata Teleservices confesses to not being “your typical startup founder.” He has plunged into the startup world after 15 years of corporate service, leveraging something very close to his heart.

“Reading has always been a deep passion for me. So much so that if work consumed my entire day, I would wake up two hours earlier to take time out for it,” says Gaurav, a graduate of the premier Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad.

The human attention span today is 8 seconds – less than that of a goldfish.

However, that was not the case with his younger team members. “I could see them wanting to know more, but not having the patience to read books.” The human attention span today is said to be 8 seconds – less than that of a goldfish (which by the way is 9 seconds)!

For them, Gaurav has an app. Bookbhook, which is Hindi for ‘hunger for books’, condenses a non-fiction tome to a 10-minute read.

Photo credit: Blok 70.

Bookbhook has seen 30,000 app downloads on Android since October last year. You could call it an Indian version of Blinkist, only it is attempting to do a few things for India that the Germany-based app does not.

When in India

You get to read summaries in English and Hindi – there are around 50 so far on Bookbhook, and an additional 200 are in the pipeline. You can also listen to audio summaries.

“Blinkist is way too big and way too good for us to compete,” acknowledges Gaurav. “But then, it doesn’t focus on Indian readers.”

That is where Bookbhook hopes to carve a niche. One way it is doing that is Hindi summaries. One of its most popular titles is legendary entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s Zero to One in Hindi.

Another way is including books by Indian authors. Late Indian-origin surgeon Paul Kalanithi’s memoir When Breath Becomes Air and Super 30: How Anand Kumar is Changing the World 30 Students at a Time are among the sought-after on the app.

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