 Hello So I might or might not to use my slides depending on the answer to this question And I can't really resist the opportunity to ask a question when I have a captive audience like this How many of you have been in a physical bookstore this year? Practically everyone wow The clay people didn't make it done it We got to work on them put some chips or some motors in them or something Well, wow that's that's you know amazing So my name is Praveen Madan and you know my engineer and MBA and for many many years I was working down in Silicon Valley like thousands of other engineers and MBAs You know working away in corporate America and doing pretty well And then about five years ago. I met a left turn in my career. I decided to focus on bookstores. I Saw there was something very powerful going on Where every time a bookstore would close There will be this sigh and moaning from the community people who change themselves and give try to give bookstores money Please don't go out of business. We need you You don't see that with any other commercial institution in this country With banks you're seeing the exact opposite the Occupy movement So I was really intrigued what was it about bookstores that people love so much that they're trying to save them And they're trying to you know make them work and then they're trying to make them stick around So five years ago on a hunch. I you know left my corporate career and jumped into it you know, we took over our first bookstore in San Francisco the Booksmith and You know, we've been working on it. It's you know, our sales are growing double digits every year or you know We are winning awards every year And it's doing really well and now I'm involved with Kepler's How many of you from the Bay Area? No, mostly all people so hopefully you guys know about Kepler's Kepler's has been the bookstore of Silicon Valley for about half a century It's outlasted Sun Microsystems web van Netscape All these technology companies they come and go every five or ten years Kepler's is still standing so a few weeks before Christmas they called me and Clark Kepler said I don't think I'm gonna make it and I'm planning to liquidate my business And do you want to buy my mailing list? And I said you're out of your mind Kepler's is like Yosemite National Park You can't close Yosemite National Park. It's a community asset so And even I had questions whether you know, whether there was a market for it I mean, this is the heart of Silicon Valley Practically everyone has an iPad or a Kindle and you know people are reading e-books and they all this larger narrative That with the digital books we don't need bookstores and we don't need physical books anymore Well, my narrative started getting questioned very early on as I got involved with Kepler's in the middle of December I was standing there in the bookstore Waiting for to talk to somebody and I saw this guy walking around he was wearing one of those corporate given You know jackets and it said the Google ventures And I you know the networker and me said hey somebody from Google ventures in here. Let's talk to this guy Well, it turned out it was David Drummond anyone from Google here No, nobody from Google. So David Drummond is on the executive team of Google. He's been there for 10 years He heads illegal corporate development and you know, he and then he tells me he's actually managed Google's e-book program for about two years So when I realized who I'm talking to I turned to when I said David, what are you doing here? You're the type of guy we would expect is only reading digital books and here you are in an independent bookstore And you're buying books and he's got a basket and he's packing it full of books He's got six books in there already and he's still shopping. I'm like, what are you doing here? And he didn't even have to think about it He looked straight at me and said Praveen Pixels don't do it for me when it comes to books. I still need real books. That's what I'm doing here I'm shopping for real bucks and he said I live in Los Gatos. There's no good bookstores in Los Gatos So I come here and then he pointed to his son his four-year-old son who was You know running around in the children's section at Kepler's and said and I want my kid to know real bucks. So I bring him here so You know and then we did surveys You know Kepler's has about 15,000 people on the mailing list. It's a small mailing list But you know for a hyper-local business like a bookstore. That's a pretty solid mailing list You know in January we did a survey and we asked people well, what do you value at your bookstore? 95% of the people said they'll value coming to Kepler's because They want to be able to come to a place where they can browse and they can discover new ideas 91% of the people said the value Kepler's were buying books. This is in Silicon Valley This in the heart of Silicon Valley the new Facebook headquarters is one mile from Kepler's You know the venture capital community is on Sand Hill Road, you know another two miles You know on a different side so in the heart of Silicon Valley people are telling me the still want a bookstore They want a bookstore to come to author events. They want a bookstore to meet other you know intellectuals. They want a bookstore, you know to be able to You know browse and discover, you know new things Physical browsing is still three times. They've been studies done on this physical browsing is still three times more powerful To help you discover new Material new ideas new books and think about this Amazon has been at this for 18 years But there are algorithms and physical stores are still ahead in terms of creating a you know beautiful well-curated, you know physical display so Let me jump to you know forward to you know just to talk a couple minutes about DP LA What would we bookstores like from DP LA? I Think first and foremost we would like to be included as I'm reading the program I see a list of institutions mentioned here and it doesn't mention bookstores So so we would like to be included we will very much like to be part of this new digital future that you know bookstores are creating Technology has been the Achilles heel of bookstores and continues to be that way We have no good technology partners You know, it's not our booksellers association, you know, who's basically you know doing this with you know Three and a half engineers in New Jersey. It's not Google who just dropped the ball on you know working with independent bookstores We've been looking and looking and looking would really need good technology partners And the opportunity that we see as we become you know more and more focused on our true mission of literacy and spreading books and spreading literature is that books have only reached about 50% penetration in this country so far Think about that cable television reaches 90 plus percent of the people internet reaches 90 plus percent of the people But 50% of Americans do not read a book after the graduate from high school. This is based on any if the National Education Association says You know studies So our mission really is to continue spreading books and literature and we would love to have access to an open source Platform through which you know, there's rich metadata. We can build our own applications. We can target our communities We can build you know new and interesting revenue models because our communities want us They want us to stick around they want us to be relevant, but we really need to you know play more strategically in the digital world So that's what we would like to see. Thank you