Our vision is rooted in a single, foundational belief: the right book in the right hands can change a life.
This isn't just about managing books; it's about unlocking human potential. We believe the current infrastructure for discovering and connecting with books is outdated. In an age of AI, where information is abundant but trust is scarce, the world of books requires a new operating system.
This isn’t about restriction or control. It’s about preserving access, trust, and connection. Every reader deserves the chance to engage with ideas safely and confidently, and every educator deserves the assurance that those choices are protected.
Why Do Books Need a New System?
"Why? Because the system for finding books is broken. It's analog in a digital world.
A book's potential is trapped behind its cover. Its true value—the ideas inside—is invisible to the algorithms that now dictate discovery. And in a world of endless, shallow content, invisible means lost.
This creates a paradox: For a book to be truly discoverable in this new age, its core ideas must be understood by AI. But to earn that trust, authors and publishers must know their work is unequivocally protected.
We are the only company built to solve this. Our solution is a secure, 'black box' infrastructure built on a foundation of absolute trust.
It's an environment where publishers and authors can place their work, knowing it is protected from all angles. Our Book Intelligence, the 'Bookmarked Brain,' goes inside this secure layer to analyze the content, but the book itself never leaves. We don't serve the content; we serve the intelligence about the content.
We protect the source while unlocking the content for discovery.
This is the 'Learning & Reader Intelligence Layer.' We are building the system that finally makes books intelligent, connecting readers to the ideas they need and authors to the audience they deserve.
We are not just saving books from being removed from shelves; we are saving them from being buried by the future—becoming irrelevant not because they lack wisdom, but because they are invisible to the very algorithms that will guide the next generation of discovery."
The "Holy Grail" Technology: The Content Scanner
To achieve this grand vision, we are building the "holy grail" for book intelligence: our Content Scanner.
Developed in partnership with Amazon AWS and scheduled for its full release in early 2026, the Content Scanner is the technology that fulfills our vision. It's what allows our Book Intelligence to read and understand every single page, transforming a static book into a dynamic, queryable source of knowledge. This engine is the foundation for our long-term vision of personalized student discovery.
Our Strategy: The Texas Beachhead
To achieve this grand vision, our go-to-market strategy uses the new regulatory landscape as our strategic inroad. This new wave of legislation has created an immediate and operationally impossible choke point for school districts—a high-stakes compliance requirement being forced through old, manual systems that can't handle the load.
While legacy systems are merely 'checking a box' to stay relevant, we are providing the only true platform that solves this core problem and simultaneously builds the infrastructure for the future of book access and discovery through Book Intelligence.
Our strategic beachhead is the Texas K-12 market. We are providing the only truly modern solution to a compliance problem that has been deteriorating for years. The 'old way'—relying on analog systems and outdated data—has left collections stagnant and districts legally exposed. Our unique, intelligent approach is why districts are embracing us as we establish Bookmarked as the indispensable standard in the largest and most complex regulatory environment: the trusted, defensible system of record that finally provides a path forward.
The Problem We Solve Today: The New Operational Gap
A new wave of legislation, seen in Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, and other states, has created a "humanly impossible task" for school districts. These laws have opened a massive operational gap between new, high-stakes legal requirements and the old, manual systems districts are using.
Our beachhead state of Texas provides a clear case study of this operational gap, where specific laws have created new, high-stakes burdens:
- Texas Laws (SB 13 & HB 900): Following the 5th Circuit's block of HB 900's vendor-rating system, the entire operational burden of reviewing and approving books now falls 100% on the school districts themselves.
- The Mandate (SB 13): SB 13 creates a specific, high-stakes process for reviewing new book orders (via the LSLAC committee) and reconsidering challenged ones. It also mandates that any challenged book be immediately removed from student access until the review is complete.
- The Stakes (SB 412): This law repealed the "bona fide educational purpose" defense for educators, dramatically increasing the personal legal exposure for librarians and teachers and raising the stakes for ensuring every book is compliant.
- The Liability: This new liability extends beyond the main library to the thousands of unmanaged books in classroom libraries, creating a massive blind spot for district leaders.
- The "Operational Tax": We've quantified this "impossible task." At an average cost of $135 per book to review manually, if all 13,300 U.S. school districts had to review the same bestseller, the total compliance cost would exceed $1.8 million for a single title.
Our Solution: The OnShelf Defensible System of Record
Bookmarked's OnShelf platform is the specific and necessary solution to this operational gap. It provides superintendents and school boards with what they need most: a defensible system of record.
It does this by integrating three key components that use our foundational Book Intelligence to solve today's problems:
- The Book Intelligence Shield: This is our proactive, defensive data layer. It continuously scans all school and classroom libraries to flag potential risks before they become a public crisis, giving leaders a complete and defensible view of their liability.
- The OnShelf C.O.R.E. (Compliance & Ordering Review Engine): This is the operational workflow that directly solves the SB 13 mandate. It's a single, digital system that manages the entire book approval and reconsideration process—from the LSLAC committee review, to the public comment period, to the final, auditable board vote.
- The Classroom Library Module: This purpose-built tool closes the district's biggest liability gap. It gives teachers a simple way to upload and catalog their classroom books, automatically running them through our Book Intelligence engine for review and approval before they are made available to students.
By solving this acute, operational pain, we gain the critical mass of districts necessary to ignite our two-sided marketplace. This creates an irresistible pull for publishers to join our platform, giving us the data and partnerships needed to scale our Content Scanner and build our ultimate "Learning & Reader Intelligence Layer."
Bookmarked isn’t about deciding what students can or can’t read. It’s about giving districts and educators confidence that access to ideas is both responsible and protected.