It's just been a month since they have begun their business journey again. And before we get started about the details, we wish the Placing Literature team a heartiest comeback to the industry.

The most striking detail of this startup for me was obviously the name. Naming your enterprise that compliments your functionality in a bang on manner is never an easy thing to do. Placing Literature, with its sublime mission statement of "Where Your Book Meets The Map" says it all.

An online database of places from literary scenes that readers come across in novellas and classic texts, Placing Literature allows users to make the experience of reading fun filled and realistic. How? Well since it is an initiative that is a combination of "database, Google Maps and the efforts of a bunch of lit geeks", the readers get to geo-tag locations that they have read in the novel they are reading or have read in the past.

When we say books can transport you to a parallel universe and unseen sights from afar, technology is making the exploratory tool come alive with this Google Maps-based app.

Placing Literature is the brainchild of Andrew Bardin Williams and his sister-in-law Kathleen Colin Williams who founded the company in 2012 but relaunched it on a bigger platform at 2013 the International Arts and Ideas Festival.

Its a heady mix of a writer meeting a geographer's talent. Andrew shares that as a creative author, "I use a lot of real-world locations in my novels. We decided there was this great intersection between geography and literature that hadn’t been explored before".

How many of us imagine in our heads to actually see the awesome places we are reading in a book. With this fabulous app, not only is tagging becoming popular but travelling to such destinations to explore the literary figures and understanding literature in itself is undergoing a change. "We started this project because we wanted to be able to understand how place is created by authors. Place is many things.  For this project, we are interested in place because of the emotional connections people have to place – places they know and love". 

And it is soon to become a great business for the travelling and booking industry across the world.

Since this website and its app is progressively bringing together literature with science & technology, the initiative is actively being supported by The Arts Council of Greater New Haven. Keeping in view the vast commercial and educational possibilities that the app can offer, the home team is actively collaborating with local libraries and educational institutions. So far novel locations of Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Long Shining Water" by Danielle Sosin have been logged into the database.

In spite of, working an active crowdfunding campaign to boost their site development and increase their reach, the team wants to allow users more power such as uploading photos of the locations in the books as well. However, promoting the culture of literature is their main focus. Andrew does affirm that "We have some ideas on how to generate revenue...the site won’t become home to distracting advertising that could dampen the user experience".



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