Photograph by George Sakkestad
Davina Morgan-Witts of Saratoga owns BookBrowse.com, an online place where book lovers can browse parts of books.
Website by Saratogan serves as a trip through a bookstore
By Rebecca Ray
After Davina Morgan-Witts had children, she couldn't get away to bookstores and browse books as often as she used to. She tried to buy books online. But she missed being able to read lengthy excerpts, which she felt gave her a better idea of books' content than plot summaries.
So in 1998, the Saratoga resident started BookBrowse.com, a website where visitors could read the first chapter from each featured book. The site features about 700 authors and 900 books.
With BookBrowse, "people don't judge a book by its cover," Morgan-Witts said. "They read it for themselves."
Although BookBrowse is not a bookstore, visitors can link to a site that lists price comparisons from new and used bookstores, and then link to the order page of the chosen store.
BookBrowse was the first company to publish excerpts from books online, according to Morgan-Witts. She says she knows this because she initially had trouble convincing book publishers to let her publish book excerpts on her site.
Although online bookstores now also publish excerpts from books, Morgan-Witts says, the length of the ones on BookBrowse is unique.
In addition to free reading guides, or questions to help stimulate readers' thinking about books, the site features author interviews, book giveaways, news stories on happenings in the publishing industry, a weekly wordplay and book reviews.
Morgan-Witts also sends subscribers free email updates to draw them to the site.
The newest section is the "book club" section, which provides information on how to start a book club.
More than 100,000 people visit the site each month. Newspapers have written about it. Yahoo! once named it its "incredible site of the day."
According to Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse has always been profitable, and has made more money each year. Although she doesn't make enough money to live off of in Saratoga, Morgan-Witts says--her husband, Paul, works at Hewlett-Packard, and she has no job outside the home--she makes enough to live off of in other parts of the country.
While Morgan-Witts' main source of income is display advertising from four or five main advertisers, she also receives publishers' payments.
BookBrowse features some bestsellers, as well as both well-known and less-known authors of various genres, including the thriller, biography, African American, children's, and health genres. The site also sells audiotapes.
Although she adds eight new books to her site each week and tries to add at least one book from an unknown author, Morgan-Witts says she doesn't include books that were published more than six months ago or that have received too many negative reviews.
Morgan-Witts' current career is a far cry from her previous one. Before, she says, she did the whole "marketing mix"--marketing research, buying ads, managing accounts and being a marketing manager--for at least 10 years in England.
But when Paul traveled to the United States on a working visa eight years ago, Morgan-Witts, who did not have a green card, had the opportunity to not work and think about what she really wanted to do. The only person she is working with right now, other than her husband, is a person in Canada who designs the code for the web pages.
However, the interaction with others is Morgan-Witts' favorite part. Although she has never met any of the people whom she has met online through her business, she says she loves it when visitors tell her they live 50 miles away from the nearest bookstore and that they rely on her site for information on books.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
