Cool to see more apps like these popping up.
Since you don't offer a book store and instead require people to import their own books, I'm curious to hear you'll make sure readers will find each other? I worked on a similar concept a few years ago and that was one of the main problems we encountered to make it a success. Few solutions we considered that might be helpful for you:
- Allow users to share ebooks with each other. This might not be legal depending on the copyright of the book
- Involve authors that can bring their existing audience to your platform
- Build a book store
- Integrate with an existing book store
- Start a bookclub or have other publishers like e.g. Product Hunt start a book club on your platform (share the commission fee).
Without something like that I think it's hard to make the model work. Curious to hear your thoughts on this.
@marckohlbrugge nice one!
First of all, people can find their ebooks wherever they want on the internet. The Bookstore concept never appeared important to us since we’re grown up enough to know which book to read next.
Our app is firstly about reading, and inventing new gestures on iPad. It’s not a mere anecdote. We really think the current reading software never thought about modeling new gestures: our flick-view, our the margin on the right margin.
Today, we think about stand-alone communities that could be build-up on our exchange of corpus of annotations. A kind of de-centralized networks. We don’t think people would like to read in front of everybody else – what Glose or Oyster offer – but rather would like sharing some notes once in a while.
For example, every school could use it. We thought a lot about school, and how to bring collective reading to students and teachers. (Imagine, before an exam a student could quickly flick a book thanks to the annotations of all of his peers at the right passages in the text…). You mention PH ! PH might just be sort of a huge classroom right ;)
Of course, our next step will be integrating social media profiles. In a bottom-up perspective, you could imagine a new kind of library where you can access to all your friends’ annotations on every book you read, in live. There would be only ‘one exemplary’ of any existing book, with millions of ‘versions’ of it – the versions would only be the various corpus of annotations readers could access to. We don’t ‘bring together every reader in the world’, we rather believe that readers would prefer sharing their reading experience with their own and private community. (Of course, here comes our monetization project).
What's your opinion on that then? Does it seem like something people want?
Hey. Simon here, cofounder of Addr. Our iPad app is an ebook reader. We’re not a platform to buy and find book. We’re just the last layer where to read them, and give a better design of the (collective) reading experience. We basically focus on two things:
- self-situation in an ebook. That’s a nightmare from Kindle to iBooks. We’ve implemented a view you drag from the right, and it gives you the global snapshot of the chapter you’re into. So that you see the pictures, the next paragraphs and all.
- annotations are taken in context. It means you take a note on the right margin. You can both read the text and the notes at the same time – that’s unique in the market. When you share your corpus of notes, they’ll appear in your friends’ exemplary at the exact same place. That’s why, ‘contextual’ really matters to us.
Addr partly is about collective thinking and reading: imagine reading a book in a new way: jumping from one note to another to see and read the passages you like.
You could also think about selling your notes when they become valuable. And annotations in Addr are contextual. It means people *actually read them*.
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