There is always a time in business when the market becomes saturated and you have to find other ways to increase sales. The same is true for the booksellers, publishers, writers, or any other book-selling corporations. In this technologically advanced world, where almost every person is having smartphones, people even expect that they can read their books anywhere and anytime on their mobiles. This is the reading of why an e-reading mobile app like Kindle has been a massive hit. In this article, we are going to tell you about the essentials of an e-reading mobile application. You would be surprised to know that the number of e-readers in the US is more than 100 million. In 2019, the percentage of e-reader owners in the US is 52%. The most popular e-reading platform in the US is Amazon Kindle.
Remember, an e-reading app is not successful just by the number of books on it, but there is much more in it.
Benefits of an E-reading app for business
- It gives additional value to customers. People will have one more way to interact with your business and can buy directly from the app instead of browsing the internet.
- It also gives better brand awareness as more people will be able to learn about you through an additional channel.
- The business can improve brand loyalty as the customers will return to enjoy your app on the web, iOS, and Android.
- You can make higher sales as you have one more source of revenue, and an app usually facilitates the checkout process even for offline sales.
Benefits of e-reading apps for users
One Device, Multiple Books: Ebooks are not like heavy pages book but they are soft copy whose size is in MBs. Thus, a reader can store thousands of books in his/her mobile.
Accessible Everywhere: As the Ebooks just need small storage in the device or reader. The reader can read books anywhere and anytime. The most significant advantage is that you can read e-books while traveling.
Easy Updates: Most of the e-reading apps are cloud-based i.e. it can be updated anytime. Hence the reader gets access to up-to-date information.
Shareable Content: You can also share your favorite books or other content with your friend and family through the social feature of the ebook.
Easy on the eyes: On a device, the readers can adjust the brightness of the screen as well as the font size as per their suitability.
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Essential Features to include in an e-reading app
First, come first, every mobile app should have an interactive UI and UX, else don’t what the other features are; it wouldn’t be successful. The other features than an e-reading app should have are:
List of Available E-books
When the user will start exploring your e-reading app, the first he is going to do is wandering through the list of available e-books. Hence, you must showcase the books in a great manner. The user can understand which books are free, paid, downloaded, ready to read, etc. You can also categorize the books on the basis of the genre such as fictional, biography, technology, business, etc.
The reading apps support various formats like EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT files, Word documents, and even encrypted eBooks like those with Adobe DRM. This is required so that if the user purchase book from any other source, he would be able to read it through your app.
Offline Access
It is almost a mandatory feature for a modern e-reading application that the reader should be able to download the e-book for offline access so that he can read even without the internet.
A successful e-reading application should be supportable across multiple devices i.e. smartphones, iPhones, tablets, iPads, desktop computers, etc.
Reading friendly interface
The next thing essential in an e-reading mobile application is an intuitive reading experience. There should be easy navigation to swipe the pages, different sizes of text, bookmarks, finding meanings, etc.
Social Sharing
Social network integration for easy registration and for sharing notes or quotes from ebooks or even for sharing ebook files.
Advanced Features
Apart from these basic features, if you want your app to lead in the market and compete with apps like Google Books, Kindle, and Moon+ Reader then you need to include some out-of-the-box features. Here are some suggestions:
Personalized Content
The users should be able to add their preferences through genres and topics from the beginning of the app. You can also include suggesting reading plans for the users so they will track their progress.
Reading Statistics
Reading statistics lets the reader knows about their progress of reading habits, and also motivates them to read more. You can include detailed reading reports, and graphs to show the stats.
Night mode or Dark mode
Night mode or Dark mode is getting essential in almost every mobile app. In a reading app it is highly essential as you have to take care of users’ eyes too. Give them a break from the strong light of the device by night mode.
Automated Sorting
After making the content offline, the user should be able to sort the content as per his preference. You can also include category filters like genre, author, series etc.
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Web Version
If the users want to read their books large desktop screens then they should be able to do that. For this, you can develop the web version of your e-reading mobile application so that they can access through the internet browser.
Multi-lingual
If you are dealing with the content of learning in books, then you can provide access to your content in different languages to the users. For instance, you might let users tap on a word they don’t know and see a translation by Google Translate or Amazon Translate.
How you can make money through an e-reading app?
Currently, most e-reading apps work on the freemium model. In this model, the app is free to use but you need to purchase books to read. There may be some free sample books in the app. They may also use newsletters and ads to promote their books. However, while reading if you show ads on your app then it will be a poor marketing impact as well as an unfriendly user experience. So here are some ways you can adopt for making money through an e-reading app.
Subscriptions
Paying money for every book on the app can be too costly for the user. The users may abandon your app if the books are expensive. So you can provide them with a monthly or yearly subscription through which they can access unlimited books. This business model is adopted by Kindle and Scribd.
Another way to make money is to find partners with a similar user base. You can add partner ads to your app and ask your partners to place your ads in their apps.
You can also help the authors in improving their books by providing editing, cover design, and marketing services. This will also allow you to guarantee top-quality content, as you’ll be in control of the quality of ebooks. You can also charge them to sell their books on your platform.
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Wrapping Up
An e-reading app opens a lot of opportunities for traditional business. However, it is an attention-seeking app where the development should be done by an expert mobile application development company like Amplework Software.
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