books
Rook e-reading app lets you sample on the go
The new e-reading app 'Rook’ offers free e-books to users connected to wifi in public places, although readers need to pay to read it elsewhere. – AFP Relax pic, April 15, 2015.In the quest to bring new readers into the fold, a soon-to-launch app called “Rook” is to offer free e-books to users in certain public places – but they'll have to pay for the book, if they wish to read it elsewhere.
Rook – presented at the London Book Fair this week and launching soon in various locations around London and New York – works with the principle that those given the opportunity to sample are more likely to buy.
How it operates is this: you go online at a coffee shop, park, hospital or airport, on a train or in any other participating location. Find a book you want to read and for as long as you're there, read away. But if you'd like to take it with you, you'll need to buy it via the app.
That process is not unlike what you might do while browsing in your favourite bookstore – read all you want on-site, and then purchase what you're taking home. And a Nielsen report from earlier this year, suggested that more access to free e-books actually helps book sales: it found subscribers to Kindle Unlimited – a service that allows you to pay a subscription fee, then download e-books for free – spent more on books each month than non-subscribers.
Rook was getting accolades prior to the London Book Fair: last year the app was a runner-up at last year's TechCrunch London Meetup. It is the second innovative e-reading service, to garner buzz this month, after Oyster, described as the "Netflix for e-books," announced it had signed all five major US publishers for its online bookstore, which first launched in 2013.
The publishing industry still has inroads to make in e-reading, and making the experience more similar to print could be a step in the right direction. As data released last month by Publishing Technology suggests, Millennial consumers in the US and UK are open to digital reading but still partial to print, and Pew Internet's most recent look at reading habits, released in 2014, found that while 73% of 18-to-24-year-olds surveyed had read a print book within the last year, just 37% of them had read an e-book.
Stay tuned at www.getrook.com. – AFP Relax News, April 15, 2015.
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