Even the shyest airplane passengers are hard-pressed to remain mum when a seatmate pulls out a book with a familiar cover. Now, thanks to the popularity of e-books, these once visible book covers are shrouded in the nondescript cases of Kindles, Nooks and iPads.
This week, I tried Subtext, a free iPad app designed to enable and encourage conversations based on e-books—not necessarily with fellow plane passengers, but among readers within digital books themselves. A revamped version of Subtext, originally released in October, is available in Apple's App Store Tuesday.
Like Amazon's Kindle already does, Subtext gives anyone who reads an e-book the ability to make notes, highlight passages and to keep private or share those notes or highlights with other users. But this app goes much further: It also lets readers post questions, polls, quizzes or even Web links that are noted in the margins of the book. Other users respond to these posts and start mini book discussions that can continue indefinitely. Subtext content can be kept private, made visible to all users or made visible only to a user's friends. Along with comments from fellow readers, Subtext users can see comments marked in blue that are made by a book's author or other experts.
Unfortunately, Subtext smacks of immaturity when compared with other reading apps like Amazon's Kindle app and Barnes & Noble's Nook app. While those work on several devices and operating systems, Subtext works only on Apple's iPad. It only runs with books from Google Books or those in Adobe's ePub format, and the process for getting the latter—emailing the book to oneself or downloading the file from a website to the iPad—is clumsy and not intuitive. Co-founder Rachel Thomas said Subtext is actively developing for other platforms. ...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203718504577180980359526516.html?mod=rss_The_Digital_Solution
This week, I tried Subtext, a free iPad app designed to enable and encourage conversations based on e-books—not necessarily with fellow plane passengers, but among readers within digital books themselves. A revamped version of Subtext, originally released in October, is available in Apple's App Store Tuesday.
Like Amazon's Kindle already does, Subtext gives anyone who reads an e-book the ability to make notes, highlight passages and to keep private or share those notes or highlights with other users. But this app goes much further: It also lets readers post questions, polls, quizzes or even Web links that are noted in the margins of the book. Other users respond to these posts and start mini book discussions that can continue indefinitely. Subtext content can be kept private, made visible to all users or made visible only to a user's friends. Along with comments from fellow readers, Subtext users can see comments marked in blue that are made by a book's author or other experts.
Unfortunately, Subtext smacks of immaturity when compared with other reading apps like Amazon's Kindle app and Barnes & Noble's Nook app. While those work on several devices and operating systems, Subtext works only on Apple's iPad. It only runs with books from Google Books or those in Adobe's ePub format, and the process for getting the latter—emailing the book to oneself or downloading the file from a website to the iPad—is clumsy and not intuitive. Co-founder Rachel Thomas said Subtext is actively developing for other platforms. ...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203718504577180980359526516.html?mod=rss_The_Digital_Solution
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