Wish Upon a Story is a charitable giving app that helps young people and/or marginalised groups (e.g BAME, low-income, LGBTIA, disbaled) receive books they want to read via crowdfunding. Envisaged as a bookish ShareTheMeal. How it works for recipient: Recipient creates a profile: first name or handle, list of up to 3-5 books they would like to read, and their reasoning for why they want to read that particular book. They would also need to provide an email so they can receive a digital book, and an address for print books. They can also specify if they’d prefer an audio, e-book or print book. Graphic novels are a clear option. Books that the recipient chooses are tagged by the recipient and/or an algorithm with author, tropes, audience & genre e.g LGBTIA, time travel, #ownvoices, crime. This is to help connect them with donors + to rec them similar books that they may want to add to their Wish List. Each book has a tracker to show how close it is to being funded. Once a book is successfully funded, the recipient receives the book. If it’s digital, it’s sent via email. If it’s a print book, then an order is placed via Hive.co.uk. The recipient is given the option of writing a message of thanks to everyone who donated to them. If a book isn’t successfully funded or the recipient changes their mind about the book, there’s an option to transfer funds from one book on their Wish List to another. How it works for donor: Donor can search via book. For example, if the donor really love the book ‘This Book is Gay’, they can search to see if anyone has it on their Wish List. They can then choose to donate towards this person getting the book - either a partial amount (e.g 50p, £2) or they can fund the whole book. If no one has ‘This Book is Gay’ on their Wish List, then the donor can set up an alert so they’re notified if someone does add that book to their Wish List, and it’ll ask them if they would still like to donate. The donor can also search via tags (e.g #ownvoices, historical fiction). They can then scroll through to see if there’s any books that fit that genre etc that they want to fund. Gets notified to the status of books they’ve helped fund. Other Thoughts Important that there’s no ability for the potential donors & recipients to directly communicate with each other. The app should tap into book lovers’ want for others to read the books they themselves love. Due to GDPR it may have to be aimed at adults, or done through schools or libraries.