This morning at 6am EST, Shortcovers went live on the web and mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberry, with pricing in US and Canadian dollars.
Here are some of the Highlights :
- Users from 56 countries have signed up to Shortcovers
- Over 1000 of you signed up and downloaded our mobile apps
- Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Graveyard Book’ was the top seller, with President Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope and Gladwell’s The Outliers not far behind
- Users were buzzing on Twitter all day, including Neil Gaiman!
- The first user-inspired Shortcovers were submitted
- We had some great press – Wired really gets what we are trying to do
We also heard from many of you today – some messages of congratulations, questions about other platforms and content, and support issues
Some of your issues:
- You asked us for a better login on the iPhone
- You asked us for a bigger, less cluttered reading screen
- You asked us to let you browse our books by genre
- You asked us to let you page like you can in other reading apps
- You asked us for better error messages and navigation, especially when trying to access content with underlying territorial rights restrictions
And for every suggestion and piece of feedback you sent us, we took note, and now we’re taking some actions. We have submitted an updated App to the iTunes Store and are making a number of improvements to our Web experience in the next day or so. In the background, our team is loading thousands of titles per day into the Shortcovers service. We are also working on our next web and mobile releases.
We absolutely value every single comment we’ve received from you. Please keep it coming at feedback@shortcovers.com, or on twitter.com/Shortcovers.
Tomorrow is the second day in the history of Shortcovers. We’ll have a whole new set of featured content ready for you to discover your next great read, and we will be working tirelessly to earn your business.
Thank You,
The Shortcovers Team
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Why are your ebook prices higher than your regular book prices? Since it’s a virtual copy, shouldn’t it be the same price or less? If Shortcovers aim to compete with Kindle or iPhone’s eReader, the prices have to be sort of similar. If you can convince your publisher partners to reduce the ebook suggested list price to something reasonable (considering there is so little expense in making, storing and delivering the product), that’ll be great and I’m sure your site will really take off and be a leader in this industry.
I am so excited to see that Shortcovers has finally launched. I’m looking forward to getting more of my work up here and available to the public, especially The River, which I hope to offer as the FIRST free novel available on Shortcovers.
Congratulations to everyone involved!
Cheryl Kaye Tardif,
bestselling author
http://www.cherylktardif.com
I signed up for Shortcovers the day it went live with my nifty iPod Touch. I played a little, finding some “first chapters” to read, searched my favourite authors (and found most of them), and then, yesterday, took the plunge and actually bought a short story.
My reading experience was just fine. I didn’t feel any eye-strain, any squinting, nor did I notice myself distracted by my finger-brushes to keep the lines on the screen rolling. I had it set to the medium font size, with no worries, and all in all, I barely noticed I wasn’t reading a piece of paper.
I did use the Shortcovers the way it is being marketed – I read a bit here and there – at the bus stop, then in line at Tim Horton’s, on my breaks at work, and, finally, at the bus stop on the way home. It was a short story, not a novel, but I have to say I could see myself just as easily reading a whole book this way, over a much longer period of bits of free time while in transit.
Long version short? I like Shortcovers. There’s a minor glitch that I’m sure will be dealt with with the occasional misplacement of a space (though it could be in the e-copy of the books themselves, and have nothing to do with the software for all I know), but it didn’t derail me any more than finding a typo does. And certainly, in the case of the story I downloaded, I felt greener. There are some books I read for fun, and read for fun only the once, and then they sit there collecting dust until I find someone to give it to. This eliminates the waste of the non-collectible book in a way I quite like.
There will be more shortcovers in my future, I daresay. It won’t replace physical books for me, but it will likely stop some of my one-shot-reads from piling up around the house.