Today finalists were announced for the 2015 Digital Book Awards. The Social Entrepreneur’s Playbook: Pressure Test, Plan, Launch and Scale Your Enterprise, Expanded Edition, by Wharton professor Ian MacMillan and James D. Thompson, director of the Wharton Social Entrepreneurship Program, was named a finalist in the Nonfiction Ebook category.
Wharton Digital Press first published The Social Entrepreneur’s Playbook: Pressure Test Your Start-Up Idea—Step 1 as a free ebook following the authors’ recommendations for launching a start-up: First, you must pressure-test your idea and receive feedback from advisors. In the end, more than 18,000 ebooks were downloaded and nearly 300 people joined an advisory board to provide the authors with feedback on the book. The expanded edition, published only 5 months later, covers all three phases of the start-up to scale-up process.
Called “one of the more unusual ebook…experiments of the year” by ThinReads, the book has been adopted as part of the authors’ popular Social Entrepreneurship Coursera course, which reached more than 30,000 students in its first offering this fall.
According to the Digital Book Awards announcement regarding the finalists, “This select group represents some of the best innovation, creativity and talent in the dynamic world of digital publishing….In the uncharted world of digital disruption, these pioneers are guiding to the way to a successful and exciting future.”
The winners of the Digital Book Awards will be announced on January 14, 2015, at the 6th Annual Digital Book World Conference & Expo.