GoSpoken: can mobile books become a new revoloution?
I received an email from GoSpoken asking me to check them out. So I did, but the website was just like a shopping list so I emailed the company with some question.
Firstly – GoSpoken is a mobile books provider. You can read or receive a book in text or in audio (listen to it).
So I asked: Why Mobile Books?
The response:
• No other or book has to be carried around. In fact we have customers who do have the Sony eReader and are using our service for that very reason.
• Drives the mobile further to be THE multimedia device à Nobody goes anywhere without their mobile phone.
• Allows you to experience the product immediately on your mobile wherever you are (e.g. as you see an advert); once a book has been downloaded the user does not need network access, accessing the mobile site is subject to network access
• Matches two multi-million $ industries; books and mobile phones
• The content / site is easy to access via text codes or mobile browser
Then I asked who is the target market and audience?
The response:
The target audience are those mobile Internet that are interested in books. Since the content is very broad, ranging from fiction to business to children’s titles anyone accessing the mobile internet could be targeted depending on the book. Mainly it is 20-35 year olds, men as well as women of mostly higher income with a mobile internet data plan.
The last question was a biggie: How many people use this already?
The number of unique users grew by 60% from January to February alone to 25,000 unique visitors in only 27 days.
(I wasn’t sure if this actually answered my question as unique visitors has nothing to do with conversion)
What we think?
There are many people out there. Some or 25,000 unique visitors like or enjoy this. I am afraid that I am not a mobile book fan personally. I think that I will never use the service –but that does not mean it’s not good. I think that in the right context this could be very educational and I would buy books for my kids rather than mobile content for them.
Check out the service and if you purchase a books please email me with an account of your user experience.
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It would have to be an eInk display for me to read long-form content on a mobile device but it would seem there are plenty of people willing to read books on mobile. The best selling IT book of 2008 was iPhone: The Missing Manual. What is really interesting is that the best selling format of that book was the iPhone App. format. It beat PDF and print versions of the book. Weird but there you go. I assume people use it as a reference source on their iPhones when they get stuck rather than as something they spend an hour reading before going to bed.
I got my Kindle-1 in Dec. 2007, and got my iPod Touch in Dec. 2008. I read books using both of them, but since I always carry my Touch in my shirt pocket, it’s a lot easier for me to read from my Touch, and besides, I love the extremely clear bright colorful screen, and have several ebook apps on it which I downloaded from iTunes. I mostly read using Stanza but also use eReader, and iPhone book shelf. These are also available in the iPhone of course (they are identical except for the cell phone function), but I don’t like AT&T and don’t like to pay any monthly fee either. I have a cheap Nokia with T-Mobile, and use their T-Mobil to go prepaid service which is very cheap. But if I’m in a WiFi hotspot, then I use my Touch with TruPhone for outgoing calls, which is the cheapest of all.
Bu the subject here is reading, and netting it out, if the same book was available on my Kindle (where I have over 600 books already) or my Touch (which is the 32GB model), I prefer to read it on my Touch.