IIT alumni Jaya Jha and Abhaya Agarwal have founded a self-publishing website called Pothi.com about six months back. Pothi.com works as a marketplace for self-published books allowing users to create, sell and purchase books on a print-on-demand (POD) basis.

Inspiration struck Jha when she was looking for affordable ways to publish her poetry, without going through a tedious publication process. "About a year back I wanted to bring out a volume of my poetry, but didn't want to go through the long publishing cycle. So I became a self-publisher, using a small desktop printer for printing and my blog as my marketing and sales channel. This evolved into Pothi.com," said Jha, who worked with Google before venturing into Pothi.com.

Apart from basic free services like uploading and selling, Pothi.com also offers paid pre-press services like formatting and proof reading to give books a professional look. This is soon to be followed by services such as cover design as well as free tools to enable authors to do these things on their own. Interestingly, Pothi.com offers customization and personalization of books for individual readers. For instance, an elderly person with visual disabilities can order the book with a large font size.

Though the book is uploaded on the website, all the primary and associated rights are reserved with the author. Authors are free to publish the content on blogs or publish it elsewhere. Plus they are also allowed to take down the book anytime. "Pothi.com only has the rights to fulfill the orders received while the book is listed on our store," clarifies Jha.