A little more than a year ago, Felix Brandon Lloyd and Jordan Lloyd Bookey had a bit of a literary dilemma. With Bookey about to give birth to a daughter, they wanted to get a book appropriate to read to their then-two-year-old son.

“How do we find a book about having a little sister for a three-year-old in a multiracial family?” Bookey recalls asking. The search proved impossible before their daughter, now one year old, was born. But the challenge of finding the right book sparked a new venture that Lloyd and Bookey hope will save parents the hassle of finding the perfect reading material for their kids.

The couple’s website, Zoobean, which launched this week, aims to simplify that process by organizing children’s books according to tightly curated categories. Big booksellers like Amazon have categories on all their products, but the labels are sprawling, and a keyword search on the world’ biggest online retailer can be “overwhelming,” Bookey says.

Instead, Zoobean is starting with 1,300 titles. Through an interface that slides out from the site’s left-hand side, a user can winnow down using thematic designations that one might not find from Amazon or a big-box retailer. There are some basics, of course, such as format—hardcover, paperback, ebook—and recommended age, but Bookey and Lloyd include more thoughtful appellations to refine the search process. There are markers for certain emotional development themes, if, say, a parent is looking for a book to help their child deal with anger or courage, and social engagements, if the goal is to teach one’s child about bullying.

“It’s essentially making it easier for finding remarkable books for their children,” Bookey says. She calls Zoobean’s catalogue that because it has been selected by a panel of 10 other parents and educators they have gotten to know in their various stops around the country.

Many of the books are so finely specialized that the whole thing could feel almost academic, but Zoobean does include a few well-loved classics. For instance, Bookey explains, a parent searching for a book written for an eight-to-10-year old featuring a strong female protagonist in an urban setting could enter such terms, and land on Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline.

Bookey, Lloyd, and their children. (Photo courtesy Speakerbox Public Relations)

Then again, it can be used just as well to help parents guide their kids through dental emergencies. The five-year-old daughter of one of Bookey and Lloyd’s beta-testing parents lost a tooth prematurely, and turned to Zoobean for a solution.

Bookey and Lloyd met in the early 2000s, when both were teachers at the SEED charter school in Anacostia. During that time, Lloyd was named the D.C. Public Charter School Board’s best teacher of the 2000-2001 school year. They later moved into educational technology, which took them to Pittsburgh and then Austin, Texas, where Bookey ran Google’s grade-school outreach program.

They decided to move back to D.C., where Lloyd grew up, before the birth of their daughter last year. The city also seems like a good testing ground for their new business

“It’s my hometown, it’s where we met,” Lloyd says. “In this city we see our customers. Young families who are educated and have seen a lot of the world and want to bring that to their kids.”

Bookey and Lloyd say Zoobean’s target audience has a wide age range, but the biggest focus is on early childhood, with books aimed toward two-to six-year-olds, with both fiction and nonfiction titles, but balanced toward the factual. “The need we’re meeting is more around discovery,” Bookey says.

As far as the actual transactions are concerned, most Zoobean titles direct the user to an online bookseller. Right now, that’s Amazon. (It may be unwieldy, Bookey and Lloyd say, but its nothing if not reliably voluminous.)

Above the main catalog though, they are stocking a few titles directly in what they call their “Love Collection.” A percentage of the sales of those books are donated to an educational charity which rotates each month; currently its Reach Incorporated, a D.C. organization that helps students overcome reading difficulties.

Zoobean was first formed in April 2012 as a self-funded project; Bookey and Lloyd went full-time on it in January. They developed the site at the startup “accelerator” 1776 in downtown D.C. The site is optimized for mobile browsing—it’s smoother on an iPad than a desktop or laptop—although there is no mobile app just yet. The fledgling company is financed by $500,000 in seed capital Bookey and Lloyd received from Oakland, Calif.-based Kapor Capital.

Zoobean might be based in D.C., but its founders have visions of going national. Children’s books are a $3.1 billion annual market, and consumer products made for kids account for $25 billion overall.

“We could easily apply this model to educational games or toys,” Lloyd says.

As for the book-selection dilemma that sparked the whole venture, Bookey and Lloyd didn’t solve it in time for their daughter’s birth.

“That’s the funny part of the story,” Lloyd says. “Our daughter was born and two months later we found the perfect book.” It was All the World, a 2009 picture book by Liz Garton Scanlon, that they read about in a newspaper.