5 ways to make a better mobile ebook reader

Inspired by Seth Godin's post on reinventing the Kindle, here are my ramblings on how to make a better mobile ebook reader:

Focus on sharing for non friction books
Travel guides, receipt books, open source textbooks, self-help references, business books etc can be more enjoyable when you can share notes and highlights. Think that a business idea is great? Highlight it for your friends to read. Have questions on a particular topic? Share your queries with those who bought the same book. Want to suggest improvements on a particular receipt? Annotate your improvements for your fellow readers to see.

Imagine a feature where you can use a digital marker to highlight paragraphs of ebooks and that portion becomes a social object. This can be then be posted to your blogging platforms or be rated/voted to create attention markets for ebooks. Beyond this, I am sure there are more ways for sharing. Make use of that to create a more social ebook reader.

Enabling scalable intimacy between authors and readers
Ebooks are just the start of a relationship between an author and a reader. Why not create a feature that automatically presents a news feed based on the blogs and tweets of all the authors that the reader has favourited? Why not also allow readers to directly comment via their mobile and enable them to start a real conversation with the authors. Creating this easy way to achieve scalable intimacy is a next generation media play.

Allowing authors to become trusted filters
With so mcuh choices in ebook selections, helping readers to surface relevant and interesting reads is a great value proposition. Authors are in a great position to be that trustworth filter. A reader has already spent sufficient time in reading a book, understanding the author's perspective and establishing whether that perspective is a relevant filter for him. Next step is simply giving permissions for authors to become a trusted filter by recommending the relevant stuff including articles, books, conferences etc.

Use multimedia
Why must ebooks be just text? While words are great at flashing out details of ideas and concepts, embedding other forms of media will add richness and a more immersive experience.

Link to the rest of the Web
The ebooks are the beginning of knowledge acqusition. Use that as a starting point to link to other sources of knowledge. Read about a new term that interests you? Highlight it to search in Wikipedia and find the relevant articles for your reading at a later time. Want to know the more about the author? Highlight it to bring up other books by the same author in Amazon. Don't leave your ebook reader in isolation. Instead, use that as a starting point to better filter and explore the Web.

I think the ebooks market is finally breaking out. It is a good place to be in.

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