Consumer App (Publishing / Digitization)
A mission to digitize Slovenian professional and technical literature, shipped as a native iOS + Android app in 10 days. Readers get a full library that lives in their pocket; publishers get a structured ingest pipeline plus a complete CRM for catalog management.
Litabook is a consumer reading app with a cultural mission: make Slovenian professional, academic, and technical literature genuinely portable. The country has a strong publishing tradition but a weak digital distribution layer. Every title existed in print; few moved to ebook or audiobook in any systematic way. Litabook was the product answer.
Slovenian readers were buying their technical and professional books in print, carrying them between office and home, and annotating in margins. Publishers had the rights, the content, and the appetite to digitize, but no consumer-grade distribution surface sized for a small-language market. The incumbent global apps treated Slovenian as an afterthought.
Litabook shipped as the first-class Slovenian consumer reading app — native iOS, native Android, with a publisher-facing CRM that made ingest fast enough to be economically viable.
The consumer app is a React Native reader on Firebase: offline reading, sync across devices, highlights, notes, progress tracking, audio narration toggle, and an OLED-pure-black dark mode. The reading experience is the product.
Behind the app, we shipped the full publisher operation:
Audiobooks get an additional pass to verify narration matches the EPUB.
Traditional app quotes for this scope ran 3-6 months and significant budget. We shipped to beta in 10 days because we reused our motion-tested mobile stack and built the publisher operation as pure pipeline code. Same-day catalog publication became the norm — publishers stopped waiting two weeks for metadata.
150+ beta users across both stores in the first month. Beta feedback shaped v1 — audio narration toggle and dark-mode OLED pure black shipped straight from the top of the request list. Five publisher partners onboarded on the CRM side, validating the economics of digital distribution at small-language-market scale.
Litabook is the first consumer app branded around Slovenian professional-literature digitization specifically — not a localized international app, not a generic reader. That framing matters for publisher partnerships, ZZVZZ reimbursement conversations for professional education titles, and long-term institutional deals.
Built by GALOR in 2024 (10 days, beta to first publisher partnerships). Product is currently live and maintained by the founder team. GALOR is no longer the active engineering partner.
Any small-language market with a strong publishing tradition and a weak digital distribution layer — Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian, Baltic — has the same shape. The reader + editor + search + CRM stack is reusable; the ingest pipeline generalizes. The differentiator is never the tech — it's the cultural commitment to a specific market that global apps won't build for.
What shipped, in figures. 4 metrics.