Via the Smashwords blog:
Smashwords books are coming to an app store near you.
Today we announced an agreement with ScrollMotion that will transform over 33,000 Smashwords Premium Catalog ebooks into individual mobile apps for distribution to the largest app marketplaces for smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices.
The relationship will gain Smashwords authors and publishers free entry into the app marketplaces for Apple, Android, Windows Phone 7 and WebOS.
Our partnership with ScrollMotion expands the distribution of our books to the largest, fastest growing app marketplaces, and will enable Smashwords authors and publishers to reach new readers.
Another reason why Smashwords is the place to be. While Ebookit and Bookbaby are good options for their conversion process – and Smashwords’ meatgrinder is, frankly, a PITA – no other ebook distributor expands into new markets like Smashwords.
More about ScrollMotion.
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What’s the advantage to having your book available as an entire app unless it has some kind of app-like extra features? Book-as-app doesn’t make a whole lot of sense all on its own to me.
We’d better get to work converting all our books into “Choose Your Own Adventure” style interactive jobs… 🙂
You get compatibility with WebOS, which doesn’t currently have a Kindle app. (Amazon has announced one, due out this summer, maybe.) So you could potentially sell copies to both of the people who have a Palm Pre.
But yeah, if you’re going to deploy in an app, it would be nice to have some bonus content. At the very least, it would be cool to have an option to add an RSS feed to your blog so people could buy the book and then use the app to get updates of your content. I’ve seen some podcast-based apps for the iPhone that do stuff like that.
Good idea Jon — In addition to making the book into an actual “app” as in “appLICATION”, i.e. something that actually DOES something, linking to author blogs would save readers the trouble of manually texting up the website for access to updates. With more and more cases of textitis being diagnosed every day, this would add untold years of functionality to thumb joints around the world, while simultaneously balancing budgets by reducing healthcare costs.
In all seriousness though, I think a cool app for ebooks would be geared more toward the author’s end, allowing them to create and implement whatever added functionality their little hearts desired (easter eggs, soundtracks, pop-up images, etc). As it stands now, most ebooks are hardly any less static than their print counterparts, and that (I guess) is simply because there hasn’t been “an app for it” yet…
I wonder how much this will change things?
I would absolutely love a way to mash together an app that consisted of a book you read and a music player that pulled down music in a specified playlist from pandora or last.fm or one of those cloud music services. I usually have a playlist for any given book I’m writing, of music that puts me in the right period or frame of mind – it would be awesome to enable the reader to also listen to the same songs while they’re reading.