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Will Dages
@willdages · Head of DuoBook
Hi Everyone! We're super excited to launch DuoBook today — an app that lets you switch between reading and listening to the same story. We're a small, lean team inside a larger company (Findaway), and we built this in 12 weeks with a team of three.
We're launching with a very small catalog, but more content is on the way soon. We're focused on testing out the idea that people will read more if they aren't restricted to a single format. @alexwglenn (lead iOS developer), @tanie_a (business/strategy) and I (product lead) will be around here all day, and we'd love to hear your thoughts on DuoBook, and answer any questions you have!
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Perry Curac-Dahl
@perrycd101 · Strategist at Fueled
@willdages @alexwglenn @tanie_a Love it! As an NYC subway rider, it's annoying having to stop reading when switching trains. This seems like a nice solve.
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Alex Glenn
@alexwglenn · Senior Mobile Developer, Findaway
@perrycd101 @willdages @tanie_a Thanks! We love hearing about situations in life that DuoBook can make better.
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Austin Sandmeyer
@as_austin · Thinker/Student/Rockstar
@willdages @alexwglenn @tanie_a I love this! I don't know about everybody but this is AMAZING! Please sign me up! 🚀 PS: I second the integration with Google Home/Echo. The ability to listen to a book in my home by being relatively passive would be HUGE! Great Job @willdages, @alexwglenn, @tanie_a!
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Will Dages
@willdages · Head of DuoBook
@as_austin @alexwglenn @tanie_a Thanks Austin, we love hearing this! 🙌 High fives from the whole team 🙌
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Rob Tapella
@robtapella · ux @ jpl
@willdages @alexwglenn @tanie_a isn't this already "tested", as it's the same as Kindle+Audible? I've been doing this for a long time and it's great.
It's also similar to Pocket with their newer emphasis on text-to-speech, which promotes a similar mode-swap.
I'd say the more complicated issue is getting content. The text and audio will need to be licensed separately, or at least gathered separately if you go the free route (Gutenberg etc) because historically the two media have been created separately.
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Will Dages
@willdages · Head of DuoBook
@robtapella Hey Rob, thanks for the note! Glad to hear you already enjoy switching between text and audio. We're taking a bit of a different approach by always bundling both formats together, as opposed to having someone buying one format and then making a second purchase to add on the other format. We hope there's some value in that simplicity.
Indeed, this concept of switching between text and audio has been tested by others, but we still wanted to very deliberately test our assumptions with DuoBook, and learn as much as we can along the way. It's why we launched so quickly, and did so with such a small catalog of content. We're very focused on learning quickly, and we've already got some really great initial feedback from our first users.
Also, I wanted to note that none of our content will be text-to-speech, all our text will be aligned with human-narrated audio — that makes the alignment harder, but the experience is much much better. We love that apps like Pocket are making the mode-swap more prevalent and familiar to people though!
We have great relationships with lots of large publishing partners and independent authors (DuoBook is a product from Findaway, check out some of the other stuff we do at findaway.com), but we're starting out by testing some of our assumptions with public domain content at launch. More great content is on the way!
Thanks again for checking out DuoBook, and for the comment!
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