Couldn't agree with you more. Right now we just built a feature that we see as core to the product. In terms of what we want to offer writers, it's:
1. Control over their own content. That's why we liked the idea of building on Dropbox and using plain text. No lock in, everything you write is always on your machine.
2. We've worked out revenue numbers, and if we can provide a simple way to publish and consume ebooks that takes up a tenth of one percent of the market not currently owned by Amazon, Apple, and BN; well, that's more money than I could ever spend.
3. Dropbox can definitely do it; but I don't see how it's in their interest. I'd imagine their newly launched API was developed in hopes of having people like us build things on their platform. They've build a great hard drive in the sky, I don't think that people should fear to build on that any more than people should have feared building on top of traditional hardware.
From what we discussed, publishing on the web isn't easy if you're a writer who doesn't have an interest in blogging. We don't want to for people away from the tools available on their computer that they're comfortable with and we don't want you to have to know how to set up a web site (Wordpress, while great, is a PITA to set up for non-technical users).
We're hoping by providing ways for authors to broadcast their content and the tools to analyze traffic, they'll be able to bring their own readers in. Once we have some people writing, we can better enable discovery of new content.
Comments
Couldn't agree with you more. Right now we just built a feature that we see as core to the product. In terms of what we want to offer writers, it's:
1. Control over their own content. That's why we liked the idea of building on Dropbox and using plain text. No lock in, everything you write is always on your machine.
2. We've worked out revenue numbers, and if we can provide a simple way to publish and consume ebooks that takes up a tenth of one percent of the market not currently owned by Amazon, Apple, and BN; well, that's more money than I could ever spend.
3. Dropbox can definitely do it; but I don't see how it's in their interest. I'd imagine their newly launched API was developed in hopes of having people like us build things on their platform. They've build a great hard drive in the sky, I don't think that people should fear to build on that any more than people should have feared building on top of traditional hardware.
From what we discussed, publishing on the web isn't easy if you're a writer who doesn't have an interest in blogging. We don't want to for people away from the tools available on their computer that they're comfortable with and we don't want you to have to know how to set up a web site (Wordpress, while great, is a PITA to set up for non-technical users).
We're hoping by providing ways for authors to broadcast their content and the tools to analyze traffic, they'll be able to bring their own readers in. Once we have some people writing, we can better enable discovery of new content.