Chennai, August 25, 2025 : Notion Press, India’s largest self-publishing platform, today announced a bold new initiative – building a reader-first mobile bookstore from scratch in 100 days with the entire process being documented and available publicly. The one-of-its kind (a first for India – arguably the world) challenge will be led by Naveen Valsakumar, Co-founder and CEO of Notion Press along with a small internal team. Every step of creating the bookstore – from choosing the format and location to designing the layout, building the technology and shaping the customer experience will be shared online with readers, authors and publishers who can offer their feedback, suggestions, and critiques. The project will culminate on the 101st day with the launch of the first ever Notion Press mobile bookstore. The project comes at a time when physical bookstores are facing serious challenges from online retail and shifting reading habits. Notion Press hopes to spark new ideas, collaboration and optimism in the ecosystem with this initiative. The new Notion Press mobile bookstore will have about 3,000 titles across genres in the physical bookstore while offering online books from several publishers. The publishing firm has partnered one of India’s largest book aggregators to help readers discover and order from millions of books that are not part of the store’s physical inventory.
In his comments, Naveen Valsakumar, CEO of Notion Press, said, “At Notion Press, we’ve always believed publishing should be more open, more inclusive, and more experimental. When we shared our thoughts on bookstores recently, a few people pointed out that we have never run a book store. So instead of writing another post, we decided to build one. And we’re doing it in public, with the community watching & helping us along the way.” “Though it started as a challenge it’s not about proving a point. If it works, we will open source everything, the framework, the tech stack, the playbooks, so that any bookstore can use it. We want this to be more than one store. We want it to be a blueprint for bookstores of the future,” he further added.
