Mel’s Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Ourboox

The Original Attempt

At the beginning there was a free website with nine of my illustrated children’s books called www.Meltells.com.

Few people came to visit. I figured that we needed a website where everyone could provide their stories for free, collaborate and share and create a community and audience. Together.

How I Met My Cofounder

Roi Shternin invited me to speak at a TEDx event he was organizing. I did. When he heard about my idea for a collaborative website for creating picture e-books, he introduced me to his genius brother Ran. Ran and I met at an innovation event at the “Garage Geeks” in Holon. Ran said he could. Indeed he could.

Our rarest book

Our rarest language book is in the Lakota language. Lakota is an ancient tongue of the Sioux Indians. Today it is spoken by only some 2,500 people. Allen Wilson is trying to revive the language. Here is his lovely book.

Our first book

The first book uploaded was a poetry/photography book by my wife Shuli. She danced around the room when it was uploaded and the pages flipped. I knew we were on a roll.

Ourboox in Arabic

Half of our ten most popular books are in Arabic. This book on prepositions has been read over 13,000 times!

About 40% of our readers come from Muslim and Arabic speaking countries.

Launch of Ourboox at DLD in Munich:

We launched Ourboox at the DLD event in January, 2014 in Munich (and subsequently in the UK at BETT, a few days later). We had less than 100 test books up at the time.

Over one million reads

Our books have been read millions of times!! Over one hundred books have each been read over a thousand times each! Sometimes over 100 people are on the website at the same time.

We are on all the social media networks: