Benchmarking Ebook Reading Apps
I never understood how the hell highlighting a text could add any value. It’s a boolean thing. I’d almost say childish. Highlights killed every ebooks apps ever made. The unknown LeafLit focuses on annotations and choose not to display them right into the text. It’s thus impossible for a reader to read both the text and its annotations. In LeafLit, readers have to drag a view from the right to both annotate and read through your network’s notes.
Marvin and LeafLit share quite a fascinating interest in “power user” features. I still don’t understand why these apps try to accumulate dozens options that the average reader — the kind of user who didn’t major in typography back in college — will never dare to use. No one never complained about Google not giving ten different background colors when launching a browser.
“Power User” is sensible when one’s target is made of specialists. Photoshop lets its users define their keyboard shortcuts — and we surely couldn’t stand the opposite.
Marvin gives the possibility to modify the size of margins, the background color, the text color, the size font etc. It’s an everlasting list Marvin’s developers (understandingly) are proud to claim. Thinking about it, I first thought their target actually was professional typographers. But it surely isn’t the case, for graphic designers would all agree on a specific margin size and font (more specifically: Addr’s).
How to make money?!
Oyster pays a publisher for a book once a reader has read more than a giving amount of a book (let’s say one third). Oyster is structurally bankrupt. VCs will give money until they’ll lose it all. It’s a funny story, for it shows how stupid the comparison between books and music and movies and theater and, why not, museum, is. Every copycat will eventually fail.
I wouldn’t resist mentioning french’ Youboox, a subscription book provider, which target is stupid YA fiction. Oyster and Youboox do not “disrupt” any book industry. They try to take a share in the existing book market. Oyster might even fight innovative startups at some point, for Oyster is on the publishers’ side.
Blloon is nothing more than an original attempts to financially win over a market dominated by century old publishers. From a design point of view, pages are not the most relevant entities when displaying information on a computer screen (Google Glass and Oculus are computers, too).
Who will be the next Readmill?
I do know the main critic here: what about making money? Yes, I remember what happened to Readmill. What’s funny though is how much reading apps fight to takeover Readmill’s previous leadership. Interestingly enough Glose has been conceived during the “Readmill era”, in late 2013. Glose is somehow a Readmill copycat concerning its main design features, annotations, highlights, typography etc. Glose adds a new idea though: lets read together! They call social reading the very fact of adding social media noise so that readers will struggle to isolate themselves again.
Glose is supposed to be a market place. In fact, readers can buy up to twenty books on their platform. I myself think that Readmill went viral especially because it was an open platform. It is said that Readmill never managed to monetize — even with their smart move of cloud synch from publisher’s website and Readmill. Glose’s business model, and iBooks’ one as well, are focused on getting value immediately. They’re do not see the user base as the most precious value of them all — or maybe is that just a smart way to convince VCs quickly.
Creating Value
How to face traditional publishers then? (the one Oyster and Glose choose to take side with). Amazon did it well with a full stack and outstanding execution (if you except their lack of interest in design).
Once a reader’s community will reach a certain size, the amount of annotations taken will become valuable. A real social network for books would also make it possible for readers to sell their corpus of annotations, directly in-app, via micro-payments of some sort. (Bitcoin allows easy tipping). Such a social network could become a place where interesting readers will be rewarded, providing an incentive to create value. I don’t think of a community of specialists selling their comments on Proust’s ponctuation. Imagine something like a market for “enriched books”.
