Tech Town, NC

Morrisville based Lulu.com has partnered with Bangalore, India startup Ugenie and their flagship application weRead. Ugenie’s facebook app, iRead, has over 1 million users on facebook according to their website (though facebook puts them at 552,687 active users at the moment, still none too shabby). The facebook app, and similar apps on other platforms, track books people are reading and encourages sharing of reviews and recommendations. Lulu will apparently hope to find synergies in giving their catalog of self-published works an extra push on this network and streamlining the listing and recommending of newly published titles.

According to Lulu’s press release:

“weRead gives users access to an expanded library of all books in print, so self-published works can be compared favorably, or otherwise, with Shakespeare, John Grisham or J.K. Rowling. The possibilities are virtually limitless.”

On top of the sensible partnership of publisher and marketer, Pluggd.in thinks the “teaming” might actually be an acquisition. There is some chatter in the Twittersphere, but no hard evidence yet, so we’ll have to wait and see what comes out in the near future.