The World Cup in Brazil is coming up soon and numerous games and apps are rising up to take advantage of the biggest event in sports. Today, we look at the top 10 new android apps of the week. All of this content is available for free via the Good e-Reader Android App Store. Batman & The Flash: Hero Run – Become the savior of Gotham City and Gorilla City as you do battle with the Joker and fearsome Gorilla Grodd! Battle by night: As Batman, exit the shadows and liberate Gotham City from your nemesis, the Joker, and his army of twisted clown thugs. Race by day: As the Flash, face your archenemy Gorilla Grodd and his swarm of fearsome gorillas deep in the mysterious Gorilla City. Real Football 2014 Brazil Android – Real Football worldcup 2014 / Soccer Championship is one of the most intense and addictive football games on the play market. Pick your favorite premier league team and lead them to glory by scoring the most goals.Face different opponents as you make your way through the competition and attempt to become the champion. Spider-man AR – You can add the Amazing Spider-Man theme content to Xperia AR effect application. With Spider-Man theme you can create pictures and movies with Spider-Man hanging from a thread, attacking with a net, hanging on the wall and much more. Racing Rivals – Racing Rivals presents a huge collection of licensed cars ranging from tunes and exotics to classic American muscle. Featured brands include McLaren, Subaru, Dodge, Mitsubishi, Ford, RWB, Scion, BMW, Acura and SRT with more on the way! Zombie Road Trip Trials - The hit game Zombie Road Trip is back with an all NEW trials spin off! Hundreds of extreme missions await you and your friends in this fun filled and action packed physics game. Show off your driving, shooting, flipping, racing and zombie smashing skills in this awesome spin on the classic trials genre! Sunrise Calendar – Sunrise is a free calendar made for Google Calendar and iCloud. With an amazing design, Sunrise is a new experience that will make your life easier. Onefootball Brazil – Experience the World Cup in Brazil first-hand with Onefootball Brasil. Get up to date play-by-play match commentary in the Live Ticker, latest news and never miss a game with our comprehensive World Cup planner. With Onefootball Brasil you won't miss a minute of the action. BBM for Gingerbread – BBM brings you together in the moment with friends and family through instant chats, voice calls, picture sharing, voice notes and more. Download the official version of BBM from BlackBerry now. Food Network In the Kitchen – Cook with Alton Brown, Giada De Laurentiis, Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay, Guy Fieri and more. Save your favorite Food Network recipes, access your own personal recipes saved on FoodNetwork.com, add ingredients to your SHOPPING LIST and more with the new and improved RECIPE BOX. LEGO DUPLO Ice Cream – There's nothing like delicious ice cream on a hot summer day. Let your child help the DUPLO bunny and his friends get some ice cream by completing a series of fun and varied mini-games designed for toddlers. Top 10 New Android Apps of the Week – May 29 is a post from: Good e-Reader |
A Semi-automated Technology Roundup Provided by Linebaugh Public Library IT Staff | techblog.linebaugh.org
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Top 10 New Android Apps of the Week – May 29
Pocket Unveils Premium Edition
When I am doing laundry at the end of the day, I find all manner of things in pockets. When grilled, my kids will always tell me it is a treasure they are saving for later. In much the same fashion, Pocket for your Android device does the same thing for just about any content you can find online: articles, videos, Tweets, etc. If you put it into [your] Pocket, whatever you saved is ready when you are –you don’t even need an Internet connection. To further extend the usefulness of this app, Pocket is now offering a premium service that keeps a copy of the items you save in a permanent library (which means that your copy stays the same even if the original resource is deleted or changed). Other features come with the premium subscription, such as a faster and more powerful search (which comes in very handy once your Pocket becomes more and more full) and a tagging system to help you access content easily later. I suggest tagging things like recipes, or creating tags for people you chat to regularly –I’m always trying to remember to mention something I read when I’m next talking to my mother or sister! Subscription prices come in at $4.99/month or $44.99 a year and can be purchased directly from their website. With over 11 million users having pocketed over 850 million items, if you haven’t tried this app yet… it is time to start. Pocket Unveils Premium Edition is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Popular iOS Sunrise Calendar App Available on Android
A calendar seems like such a simple thing to construct, yet every operating system seems to struggle with getting it right. Finally Android users can enjoy the Sunrise Calendar, previously only available for iOS devices. It is 100% free, compatible with Google Calendar, iCloud, as well as Exchange Server and comes out of the box with a host of features that will make you breathe a properly scheduled sigh of relief once you start using it! It is difficult to talk about Sunrise Calendar without getting excited. Sure it has reminders and handles recurring events. Sure it has actual properly functioning timezone support. Sure it lets you tag locations for your events. Sure it uses Google Maps for directions. Sure it can connect to multiple Google calendars. Sure it will do Facebook events and birthdays. Sure it will let you see the faces and profiles of people you are meeting with that use LinkedIn. Sure it has 25,000 calendars available to add in events for holidays, sports teams, name days, week numbers and more. Sure it will give you the weather forecast for your location. Sure the synchronization actually works, in real-time, every-time. (okay, okay, you get the point… this app is full of features!) The point is this: Sunrise Calendar looks good, functions well, and will spoil you for all other calendar apps. Popular iOS Sunrise Calendar App Available on Android is a post from: Good e-Reader |
RWA’s Novel Engagement App Solves Book Discovery Issue
The Romance Writers of America has developed an upcoming app that will help its readers find new titles, stay on top of what books are soon to be released, and connect with authors who load their content through the app. Called Novel Engagement, the app will send push notifications to readers who indicate that they want the reminder of when a new book by their favorite author is to be released. RWA’s Carol Ritter and Stephani Fry demonstrated the app’s capabilities for Good e-Reader. “You can click on books and search by author, book title, subgenre, keyword, and then you can prioritize your search,” explained Fry. “The app allows a number of keywords within the genre search, as well as offers the ability to search by publication date.” When books in the app are already available for purchase, the app will actually take readers to a number of different retailer platforms to purchase the book. For ones that are pending, readers can determine whether or not they wish to be reminded on the date of purchase. Perhaps most intriguing is the ability for readers to connect with authors through their social media channels, as their account links are embedded within the app and allow users to engage at the press of a button. The romance writers and publishers have driven much of the innovation and risk-taking in the industry with things like the first ebook-only imprints, unheard of author royalties, and social media networking surrounding titles. Now, RWA’s app demonstrates once again how the romance industry is addressing needs in publishing that other so-called experts are still musing and worrying about. The free iOS and Android app monetizes from a subscription fee that authors pay to include their content in the app, which some 1,000 authors have already done, resulting in the inclusion of over 4,000 titles already. Good e-Reader will post a video soon of the full-featured app in action.
RWA’s Novel Engagement App Solves Book Discovery Issue is a post from: Good e-Reader |
The IDPF Digital Book 2014 – In Pictures
The BookExpo America event is the largest North American publishing industry conference, and it has grown to include a wide variety of incorporated events that address nearly every aspect of the book industry. Otis Chandler of Goodreads presented interesting findings on how social media use affects book discovery and sales. The Penguin Mobile Bookmobile made an appearance inside the Jacob Javits Center. Barbara Freethy, Bella Andre, and Hugh Howey presented their understanding of the state of the industry where self-published authors are concerned. Porter Anderson moderates a panel of small to mid-sized independent publishers, examining what those companies bring to the industry. Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks presents the second place award to educational ebook platform Qlovi in the Startup Challenge. Author HM Ward holds up a copy of the book behind her controversial decision to reject a Big Five traditional publishing deal. The book in its first two weeks earned nearly three-quarters the amount she was offered in the deal. Librify and Ingram presented the first place award in the Startup Challenge to Next Big Book.
The IDPF Digital Book 2014 – In Pictures is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Tolino Vision Review
The Tolino Vision was released early April in Germany and was billed as a Kindle Killer by the Tolino Alliance, which comprises of Deutsche Telekom, Hugendubel, Thalia, Bertelsmann and World View. The intention behind the Vision was to be the definitive device to own if you speak German and taps into an extensive eBook Store with over 1.2 million titles. How does this reader compare to the latest generation offerings by Amazon or Kobo? Today, we take an extensive look at the Vision and let you know if its worth it to buy. Hardware The Tolino Vision features the latest in e-Paper innovatio, e Ink Carta. This is the exact screen technology found on the Kindle Paperwhite 2. This will not only provide higher contrast, but also eliminate the refreshing when you turn a page in an eBook. There are actually settings menu options that allow you to manually set the refresh rate from every 6 pages to every 100 pages. The overall resolution is a very respectable 1024 × 758 pixels. One of the things that stands out with this model is that the screen is flush with the bezel. The only other e-reader to do this was the six inch Kobo Aura, it almost feels like a tablet or smartphone in this respect. The Vision is using bleeding edge technology with the e-Paper tech, to really give a solid reading experience. It gives you the best of the Kindle Paperwhite 2 and Kobo Aura in one slick little package. Underneath the hood is a Freescale iMx6 1 GHz processor and 512 MB RAM. There is 4GB of internal memory, but after you take it out of the box for the first time, you are relegated to two. This will store around 1,500 eBooks on average, but you can expand it up to 32GB via the Micro SD. The Tolino Vision has has brushed aluminum on the backplate and really rounded edges. There is a power button and front-light switch on the top of the unit and a Mini USB and SD slot on the bottom. There is a single software driven home key on the front, which is fairly responsive. Overall, the Vision offers one of the most compelling industrial designs I have ever seen on an e-Reader.Deutsche Telekom were the ones that actually did the RND on this unit, instead of outsourcing everything to China. Really, this certainly puts Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Onyx and Sony on notice for their next generation e-Reader offerings. Software The Tolino Vision has a fairly basic home screen that has a number of responsive elements to it. Whenever you buy or open a book it automatically appears there, making it easy to pick up where you left off. At the bottom of the main screen are 5 book recommendations from Buecher.de. You can simply click on any of these titles to see the product listing on the online bookstore. The library management system is fairly deft, with extensive options to make you feel right at home. You can easily view books with their book cover art or condense them in list view. There are options to sort the library by author, date added or by title name. I liked the ability to easily delete books on your shelf by hitting the delete key and selecting the titles. When it comes to library management 4GB of onboard storage should be enough for most people. BY default you can signup for TelekomCloud storage for books and have store up to 6GB of content. It is important to note that the maximum file size for each title is 500MB. They bill it as a way you can access your library titles in DRM format or student textbooks. The overall menu system is clean and intuitive, there are hardly any advanced elements outside of the settings menu to confuse or alienate the average user. I think the only thing in the settings menu I can see someone regularly using is the built in internet browser. Reading Experience The Tolino Vision certainly excels in the hardware department but feels lackluster when it comes to the reading experience. You cannot register an account to buy eBooks on the device or cannot even login to the store unless you are in Germany. If you adjust any of the publisher defaults in a book you are reading, such as line spacing, margins or font size, you are in for a long loading delay if you reopen a book. The most damning aspect of the Vision is the PDF rendering engine they employ. You cannot pinch and zoom to magnify a specific area or text, instead you have to longpress the center of the screen to hit the plus or minus symbol for manual zoom, but if you want to zoom on the fly things get a little crazy. The PDF rendering engine does not preserve the unrendered state of the original page you are navigating. Instead, it gives you a jumble of white noise that will likely send people into seizures. You have absolutely no preview pane on where you are in the document and once you release your finger from the page, it instantly renders. This obviously can be repaired with a quick firmware update, but since the bookstore that comes bundled on the reader does not sell PDF files, it is likely not in their best interest to fix this issue. If you are enamoured with PDF documents there is a reflow option that will strip all of images and formatting away and give you the document in pure text form. Sadly, when you do this there is no spacing between words. Youbasicallyhaveanetirepdfbookrenderlike thisquitesad. The bread and butter of the Tolino is reading your standard EPUB book. There are plenty of advanced features to allow you to change the size of the font (8) and change the font-type completely (6). You can change the margins, line spacing and revert back to the publisher defaults on the fly. If you long-press on a specific word it opens up the ability to take notes, highlights, look words up in the dictionary or translate them. Currently it offers translation and dictionary support for English, German, Spanish, Italian and French. These are not installed by default and each one is around 100MB in size. One of the things I like about note taking is the fact it will save all of them in a singular book file in your main library. Highlights will also be injected into this file, which makes it applicable for book clubs or students wanting to check on their notes, without having the sift through the whole book again. If you are reading in the dark, you have the ability to adjust the brightness level of the display while reading a book. If you tap the center of the screen it brings up a set of UI options. This is your command and control center where you can change the level of luminosity. Overall, the brightness of the screen looks completely white, unless you jack it up to the max, and it gains a blue hue. This is a situation that has faced every other e-reader company relying on this tech, Amazon was the only one to get it right so far. Wrap Up The Tolino Vision is a fairly polished ereader on a hardware level and is currently one of the most advanced ones in the world. Sadly, it is hampered by a series of software bugs and a deplorable state of PDF rendering. The great news is, this can all be easily fixed and updates can automatically be pushed out when you reboot your reader. The Tolino is worthy investment if you live in Germany, because the entire book ecosystem is built books published there. There are over 1.2 million titles in the library, which is a mix of translated works by popular American bestselling authors and books written and produced in Germany. There are also 250,000 free books available to get reading right away, although there is only one title on the reader out of the box. In the end, the Vision is a solid e-reader from a design point of view and can actually give a Kindle a run for its many in the critical German market. Just don’t expect to read PDF files effectively on it. Rating: 7/10 Tolino Vision Review is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Chinese Cubes Innovates in Language Instruction through eBooks
But one company, Chinese Cubes, offered something truly different, something that we don’t see all the time from an enhanced ebook platform. Chinese Cubes has built an entire platform for teaching Mandarin to readers of a variety of ages, while still keeping in mind the actual classroom uses of their platform. With engaging, colorful illustrations, step-by-step writing instruction, voice over narration, and more, each stand alone title address a variety of topics and themes while showing readers the Mandarin and English text. “Each book comes in three modes, with read to me or picture modes with the sound of authentic Chinese voices reading. The learn by myself mode allows someone who doesn’t have any background in Chinese to understand it.” With continuous looping features of some of the instruction, teachers can access the stories on a projected tablet and keep the instruction on the board while walking around their classrooms and assisting students. This feature is also important for students and learners who want to practice multiple steps while watching the writing instruction. Chinese Cubes also incorporates less juvenile but still highly engaging levels of instruction for somewhat older learners. Chinese Cubes was invited to submit its proposal in this year’s inaugural BookExpo Startup Challenge.
Chinese Cubes Innovates in Language Instruction through eBooks is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Disney Karaoke: Frozen App Lets You Sing Along With Your Favourite Songs
Even if you haven’t seen Disney’s Frozen, I’d be willing to bet that you can sing along to at least one song from the film. If you have a child under the age of 10 (or you are a child at heart), you can likely remember the words to the entire soundtrack. With the new Disney Karaoke: Frozen app for the iPad you can take your regular ‘in the car’ or ‘in the shower’ singing a step further! The app features music and film clips from the movie, allows you to sing along with all of your favourite characters, record your performance (complete with the original instrumental tracks) and create a gallery of your performances (that you can share with others). There are nine songs to choose from, including the award-winning Let it Go along with music videos taken directly from the film itself. The lyrics are displayed on the screen just as with traditional karaoke, so if you happen to have been living under a rock the past while, you won’t be at a loss for the words. With a pricetag of $7.99, it may seem like an expensive app to test-drive –but I think there is only one question to ask before you purchase it: “Do you want to build a snowman?” Disney Karaoke: Frozen App Lets You Sing Along With Your Favourite Songs is a post from: Good e-Reader |
FarFaria to Give Away 10,000 Subscriptions to Teachers
FarFaria’s CEO and co-founder Ajay Godhwani spoke to Good e-Reader about the platform and the partnerships they have with publishers like Orca Books–along with a Big Five publisher who will be named in an announcement this week–as well as offered a guided tour through how young children interact with their texts. “When you do picture books and you really want to make them look beautiful in the product, you move a little bit slower. We’re excited about these books, which are leveled-readers. We want to make sure that kids who navigate through our app can find something appropriate for them.” FarFaria operates on both iPad and Android devices now, and still brings readers in through an engaging map of the realm that lets the readers find content from various genres or age appropriate designations. Good e-Reader is proud to help FarFaria conduct a giveaway of their service, so three lucky readers will have the chance to enjoy the children’s book subscription service. Simply share this article on Facebook or Twitter in order to be entered in a drawing for the codes.
FarFaria to Give Away 10,000 Subscriptions to Teachers is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Library For All Brings eBooks to Low-Bandwidth Regions
Library for All is a non-profit organization that is committed to bringing ebooks to locations like Haiti and Rwanda while recognizing that those locations do not always have consistent wifi. The structure of their system lets users view the entire catalog in order to select titles while offline, then when a user selects a book, it’s possible for the book to begin downloading, then if the internet connection is cut off for some reason, the portion that downloaded is already accessible; in addition, when the connection is reinstated, the book will pick up downloading right where it left off. “The main challenge is that people are not always connected to the internet, and when they are, it’s often intermittent. It can take a day to download one book. So what we designed is that the library will pick up, even if you don’t have good connection for a short time. It will pick up and start transferring small pieces of data. That’s one of the innovations behind our technology.” This serialization allows readers to begin enjoying their content even if the full title hasn’t finished downloading. As many experts and industry watchers have already begun to explain, serialization is making a big comeback in other reading markets as well, due to things like time constraints and wifi access, so to adapt this technology to enable the serialization of a full-length title is a natural application of the concept. Library for All was a part of the Startup Alley at this year’s BookExpo America event and was actually involved in the BookExpo Startup Challenge. Due to its non-profit status, it was not in consideration for one of the top prizes, but did receive a special consideration from the judges and the sponsors.
Library For All Brings eBooks to Low-Bandwidth Regions is a post from: Good e-Reader |
The eBook Subscription Model is Here to Stay
Now, ebook subscriptions are growing in popularity, with readers and publishers alike. Everything from short term loans, all-you-can-eat, paywall leveled, freemium, and open access are arriving on the scene, and each has its pros and cons. According to data from a BISG survey, 80% of publishers reported that they would have to participate in subscription-based reading due to its popularity in the market. Those publishers have often started with midlist or backlist content, but as the concept and its compensation structure have become clear, some publishers are even placing their frontlist and bestselling titles in the models. “Different compensation models depend on that, but is it important to own the works or to access them?” asked Ted Hill of THA Consulting to a capacity crowd. “The market drives the model.” These models all have different structures and different variances in compensation. A library who participates in OverDrive is a subscription model, just as a single user who pays a monthly fee for Oyster or Scribd is as well. Of course, Hill highlighted the fact that other models that consumers and publishers are familiar with are also technically subscriptions, such as textbook rentals in higher education. “The big concern right now is the impact of the so-called Netflix model, and whether all you can eat is good for [publishers] or bad for them.” The eBook Subscription Model is Here to Stay is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Video Review of PocketBook Aqua (Russian)
Last week PocketBook announced their first waterproof and dustproof ebook reader, the PocketBook Aqua. It’s going to be released in Russia in a few weeks for the equivalent of about $200. The first video review for the Aqua has already turned up on YouTube. The review is in Russian but it gives a closer look […] |
URL: http://feeds.the-ebook-reader.com/~r/feedburner/cmWU/~3/nF01Czx4PmM/
Video Showing PocketBook Ultra in Action
The PocketBook Ultra is one of the new ebook readers that PocketBook unveiled last week, and it just turned up for a first look in a YouTube video review, which is a little surprising seeing as how it’s not supposed to be released in Russia until the end of June. The PocketBook Ultra is a […] |
URL: http://feeds.the-ebook-reader.com/~r/feedburner/cmWU/~3/FE3FEHxh0Mo/
Wowio to Launch Free Ad-Supported eBooks with 350, 000 titles from IngramBooks
Yesterday Wowio issued a press release revealing their plans to move forward with the concept of offering ebooks for free, but with ads injected into them. They have partnered with IngramBooks to provide over 350,000 ebooks. Wowio just launched a new ebook app for Android, and they have apps for the iPad and iPhone, as […] |
URL: http://feeds.the-ebook-reader.com/~r/feedburner/cmWU/~3/-W4h2-NiQjI/
Explore your Raspberry Pi with our Online Usage Guide
You may remember the announcement of our new open source documentation, which is a GitHub project containing information about the Raspberry Pi hardware and software – and how to use it. The information is deliberately quite short and concise, and we only cover Raspbian specifics in order for us to maintain it well. The docs are managed on GitHub and displayed here on our website at raspberrypi.org/documentation. While planning this, we created a Usage section and listed the applications we wanted to write basic guides for – a way for us to show people the basics of what they can do with a Pi. We covered the icons on the Raspbian Desktop and other programs which are pre-installed, and added some interesting additional material you have to download and install yourself, like Minecraft. I pushed the 500th commit to the project this morning, and it’s great to have seen contributions from members of the community too. Thanks to all who’ve helped build the docs. Whether you bought your Pi for a specific purpose or you bought it to explore and learn, I’m sure there’s an area you haven’t discovered yet, or haven’t been introduced to yet. We’d like to encourage users to explore these applications – and we’re giving you an introduction to each of them! We cover:
So if you’ve been playing with Scratch for a while now, why not take a look at making music with Sonic Pi? Heard about Mathematica but didn’t know where to start? Go ahead. Want to learn to set up a basic web server on your Pi? Try the WordPress guide. Got a camera but only used it to take pictures of your cat? Try a time-lapse, or see how you can use Python to control the camera. Heard XBMC makes a great media centre? Set up your own. There’s lots to be done with the Pi out of the (proverbial) box – so take the chance to explore, and learn something new! Once you’ve covered the basics, take a look at our free learning resources for something new, or search the blog for ideas. If you spot any mistakes in the docs, or think of something we should add – why not open an issue or fork the project and create a pull request with your changes? There’s a GitHub link at the bottom of each documentation page. |
5 Tips for Printing Word Documents
Need help printing your Microsoft Word documents? Check out these tips! |
URL: http://blog.gcflearnfree.org/2014/05/29/5-tips-for-printing-microsoft-word-documents/
BiblioBoard, Self-e and the Curation of Self-Published Titles
The initial reaction to the first announcement of Self-e was mixed from two camps, first from self-published authors who felt the sting of someone suggesting that their work needed to be curated in the first place, but then also the critics of indie works who lauded the idea that they wouldn’t be inundated with what they perceived to be low-quality works. The idea behind Self-e actually addresses both of those concerns. “I do believe there’s a huge need for curation, saying, ‘These are books that libraries should have absolutely zero apprehension about sharing with their patrons.’ I don’t think there’s any better person than Library Journal for that process.” Davis spoke to the fact that Self-e is a malleable concept at this point, that the way it functions at the present time may not be what the product looks like in even one year. But for now, it appears to be one of the best opportunities in so far as it is a way for libraries to stop shunning indie authors’ works by receiving feedback from a trusted name in the library space. “The state modules are going to be a different animal, they aren’t going to have a Library Journal editor saying, ‘I’ve read this book and it’s good.’ That’s going to be a different experience, and there will be different parameters for states to say what they want in the catalog.” One of the interesting aspects to Self-e is that there is expected to be feedback for authors on why their book wasn’t chosen of for the main catalog, offering insight into what they would need to do in order to bring the book up to that standard. At the same time, not being selected for the curated list does not remove a book from a state’s module, so it’s not so much a “club” that authors are trying to get into as it is a label that says the book has been vetted for inclusion. The intention is to allow librarians to feel confident in the self-published works they use their budgets to invest in, while acknowledging that a great number of these works are worthy but are currently being ignored.
BiblioBoard, Self-e and the Curation of Self-Published Titles is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Wattpad Continues to Build Reader-Writer Engagement
“I think that a lot of things that are at the core of what Wattpad does, that we’re very mobile, very social, tends to appeal very strongly to a millenial audience, that’s not to say that we don’t have a lot of users over thirty. When you’re looking at 20 millions users, yes, a lot of our content tends to be teen fiction, but that’s not to say there aren’t fantastic literary fiction communities, and science fiction communities, and mystery and thriller. As far as our demographics, they’ve also been growing up into that under 30 group, so 18 to 30 year olds are forty percent of the site.” Lau announced during his panel one of the exciting new instances on Wattpad where a series of posted writings have been picked up for publication by Simon&Schuster and have already been optioned for a film. The series, “After,” already has over 800 million reads of its extensive chapters. Other Wattpad titles have also been picked up by Macmillan and Sourcebooks, to name a few, which begs the question if the natural evolution of publishing submissions will be to use Wattpad not only as a “slush pile” for the industry, but also as a way to demonstrate a following and genuine interest to publishers. “Some of our writers want to be published, some of them don’t, as well. But we’re noticing that trajectory is to figure out who the right partner for that book is. We are not a publisher and that’s not the core of what we do, but we’re definitely seeing publishers looking at Wattpad. People are including their Wattpad stats when they go out and look for an agent or publisher.” These following numbers are a way for authors to “prove” to authors that there is a definite interest in a certain title or type of work, something that is especially important for those works that blend the lines of genres or take huge risks that might be too big for traditional publishing. “We’ve always had people worried that people wouldn’t read it because there was nothing else out there like it already, and I think that’s where people can really show that on Wattpad. There’s nothing else like it and that’s why someone should take a risk on it, because look how many people are enjoying it.” Gardner went on to explain what’s behind the interest in taking a free book, readily available on Wattpad, and turn that into a purchasable book. As she explains, there is a tremendous amount of connection between readers who influenced a work in progress through their feedback and support, and those readers like being a part of that author’s success. Authors who do find the largest support base are the ones who treat Wattpad like any other social media site and actively engage with their potential readers.
Wattpad Continues to Build Reader-Writer Engagement is a post from: Good e-Reader |