Hardbound - Stories for curious minds

The entirety of the success of this app relies on the stories which are selected to view for free. Choose wisely.

Congrats Nathan and team! Looks great :)

Congrats team! Been following since @nbashaw's original blog post about mobile and how cinema became a thing. Impressed by what you've accomplished so far 👊!

Awesome! So powerful for the visual learners out there. How are you planning on monetizing?

Love this. Museums, national parks, all all national monuments of all shapes and sizes should get on board with this ASAP... It's always a pain to pay a deposit and rent a self-guided device so this should be a major step forward. Everyone can enjoy rich content right on their own phones. Love the format! Great job @nbashaw

YAY. I’ve been super excited about Hardbound from the beginning. Definitely reminds me of Snapchat stories but when I look at Hardbound stories, you can already feel this is by far only the beginning of what can and will be the start of a new reading experience in the digital age. As someone who was in self-publishing, in hopes to change how people perceive digital books and the experience of digital reading, I’m beyond impressed and so excited to see what's happening here. Rooting for you two!

@nbashaw Amazing work!! Question: Hardbound obviously has much potential for different niches; fiction, drama, etc etc. Most of your content is focused on teaching people about things. Why is this?

Very cool app. But so many paid content.

Oh man, you guys don't have this for Android yet?

I was lucky enough to get to test the Hardbound beta, and spend some time talking to Nathan about the possible directions in which the platform can grow. The UX is pretty delightful - as the founders have described it, it's a bit like a self-paced video, where your taps and gestures determine the speed of "play," but the result of that play is a mixture of transitions in the text and images peppered with unexpected and often quietly thrilling animations. It's never too much and, in the best stories, it plays upon the rhetorical movements of the story, reinforcing important points by forcing you, just for a moment, to pause and experience an effect while what you've just read sinks in. I'm a really big fan of the mobile experience and think Hardbound has a lot of potential to inspire a new way of thinking about stories and how we can use these devices in our pockets to tell them. Congrats on the launch, guys!