Bukuma!

~ the obituary ~

Hiroyuki Tsuruta was born in Nagasaki in 1991 and enrolled at Hosei University in April 2009. He quit in July and started again at Keio that September. On the night of 11 March 2011, stranded in a driving-test center lobby in Tochigi that had been turned into an evacuation shelter, he put up a site called prayforjapan.jp. It took more than three million visits, from inside Japan and outside it. Three weeks later he incorporated Labit on money from a group of Japanese founders including Hatena's Junya Kondo. That December, aged twenty, he won Launch Pad at Infinity Venture Summit, the youngest winner it had had.

Bukuma! was the last thing Labit built, and the pitch was a stopwatch. Ten seconds to list a book. You pointed the phone camera at the ISBN barcode printed on the back cover, the app looked the number up against a prepared catalog, and the title and the publisher arrived already filled in. Then you set a price. Everything that makes selling a secondhand object tedious, which is describing it accurately, had been done by the publishing industry years earlier and was sitting there in a database.

The company called the result a catalog-type flea market and claimed to have established a new genre. Press releases say that constantly and it is usually noise. Here it had something behind it. iOS went up on 25 August 2016. By the Android launch on 9 February 2017 the cumulative total was 200,000 books listed, arriving at around 20,000 a week.

~ the case file ~

~ ten seconds a book ~

The barcode trick is the whole reason this deserves a grave. A general marketplace has to accept that a listing is a small writing task, which is why so many of them are three blurry photographs and the word "used". A book has a globally unique number stamped on it by law and a public bibliographic record attached to that number, so the writing task disappears.

What Bukuma! was really selling was friction removal measured in seconds, against a competitor that had removed almost as much friction for everything. That is a narrow strip of ground to stand on, and it was enough for a while because clearing a shelf of forty books is forty listings, and forty times ten seconds is a different afternoon than forty times three minutes.

~ selling new books inside a flea market ~

In 2017 the app did something stranger and smarter. Labit tied up with the publisher Discover 21 to sell brand-new books inside the secondhand marketplace, describing it as a fusion of the flea market and e-commerce. A publisher agreeing to put its new stock on the same screen as used copies of that stock is not an obvious trade, and it only works if the catalog is already the spine of the product.

~ the team went to the buyer ~

In September 2017 Labit transferred Bukuma! to Trista, a company founded in 2008 around the reading-log site Bookmeter. Trista had become a wholly owned Dwango subsidiary in 2014, and by April 2018 it belonged to BookWalker inside the KADOKAWA group. Trista had form here. On a single day in May 2017 it had closed its game log and its music log, along with a travel photo service.

In October 2017 the Labit people joined Mercari, and Tsuruta took an executive role at a Mercari subsidiary. So the engineers who had spent two years proving that books deserved their own flea market went to work for the general flea market that made the argument moot, and the app stayed behind with a publisher's IT subsidiary that had inherited it rather than chosen it.

The closing notice appeared on the store listing in the usual register: as of Tuesday 3 December 2019 the Bukuma! service would end, with functions stopping in stages after that. Trista itself was absorbed into BookWalker and dissolved on 1 October 2021, so the owner outlasted the app by less than two years.

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