Murthyraju is co-founder of BookConnect, a book industry start-up, that aims to improve the availability and discoverability of books in Indian languages. His current focus is on promoting the effective use of metadata by publishers in India, particularly those working with books in Indian languages. He is also involed in BookConnect’s metadata platform specifically developed for publishers in Indian languages and a collaborative book discovery platform aimed at books in Indian languages.
Murthyraju is an advocate of Free and Open Source software and Open Standards and has experience in the areas of Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Web programming etc.
Murthyraju feels that the publishers and sellers are not able to tap the market available in India due to inherent limitations of physical stores in a linguistically diverse country like India. He feels that online retail offers the best solution for this, as it can address the issue of availability effectively, provided the publishers/distributors are well equipped to benefit from the online retail. He feels that the realisation of the importance of metadata and the willingness to take ownership of their metadata among the publishers is the key to effective online selling of Indian language titles.