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It\u2019s fair to say the smartphone camera has become\u00a0the digital tool of most use, rendering the average person\u2019s camera roll essentially a\u00a0memory buffer where carefully composed photographs rub up against\u00a0snaps of receipts, funny stuff you saw on the street and fancied\u00a0sharing with friends, and, sometimes, snippets\u00a0of text you came across\u00a0in a (paper) book\u00a0and wanted to make a note of. Snapping a photo in that moment is\u00a0a stand in for the lack of real-world copy and paste.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s the latter kind of photo (text quotations) that the founders of\u00a0smartphone app Postepic<\/a> want to liberate from this unstructured jumble of visual data. Indeed, the first version of the app, released last year as a bootstrapping side-project by a bunch of book-loving friends\u00a0after they graduated from university in Poland, was just a basic way for them to organize and share photos of the quotations\u00a0they had cluttering their camera rolls.<\/p>\n \u201cWe started this project as we wanted to build something together,\u201d says co-founder \u0141ukasz Konofalski. \u201cWe all share a passion for books and were used to sharing quotes and books recommendations between each other. We came across some reports that showed that in Poland in 2016 only half a book will be read on average, so we also wanted to support readership in general by building a bridge between traditional books and mobile world.<\/p>\n \u201cTwo things really surprised us when we finally launched it in June 2016: the number of new books worth reading we discovered by simply sharing quotes with each other; and a very warm reception we received from the developers and users communities alike. We have received volumes of valuable feedback from them \u2014 and got back to work.\u201d<\/p>\n Version 2 of the app<\/a>, which launched this week, turns a basic\u00a0idea\u00a0into an app that has enough form and function to feel appealing to use. The core\u00a0additional feature is optical character recognition (OCR) \u2014 meaning that instead of uploading and sharing ugly-looking (and hard to read) chunks of raw page text, i.e. in their original photo form, Postepic users can now lift the words\u00a0off the page, capturing and editing the text and its visual presentation by\u00a0choosing from\u00a0a\u00a0selection of fonts and backgrounds.<\/p>\n The final result presents\u00a0the text snippet\u00a0inside a square frame, in a way that\u2019s both easy to read and\u00a0visibly pleasing (for an example of how utilitarian quotes looked in v1 of the app see the image at the bottom of this post). So Postepic\u00a0basically lets people turn a favorite quote into an easily shareable unit of digital social currency. Aka,\u00a0an \u2018Instagram for book quotes\u2019.<\/p>\n Last year <\/a>Facebook added a feature aimed at enhancing the impact of\u00a0the text statuses\u00a0<\/a>being shared via its platform, giving\u00a0users the ability to add colored backgrounds to their text\u00a0updates to make\u00a0them more visual. And with so much visual noise being injected into messaging and communications apps, this is hardly surprising. Point is, if you want something to stand out in the age of Instagram Stories (Snapchat Stories, Facebook Stories, WhatsApp Stories\u2026 etc etc), it has to look right as\u00a0the bar for being\u00a0noticed keeps getting higher<\/a>.<\/p>\n And with\u00a0all this visual noise clamoring for our attention, it can feel like the written word is\u00a0being forgotten or overlooked as people ditch\u00a0a thousand words in favor of\u00a0sharing a few photos. Yet a well-turned phrase has the power to be both arresting and enlightening, as well as a hint of\u00a0greater\u00a0depths lurking within the full work. So\u00a0given how much attention has been (and continues to be) lavished on\u00a0visual forms of communication \u2014 from photo filters to selfie lenses to style transfer \u2014 there\u2019s arguably space\u00a0for a clever social sharing app that brings the power of the written word back into focus.<\/p>\n Notably, Apple\u2019s new social video sharing app Clips includes an auto-captioning feature. That\u2019s great for accessibility, but also a reminder that words-as-text still have power\u00a0and \u2014 with a little technological automagic \u2014 can be effortlessly edited back into the selfie frame.<\/p>\n Postepic is not the first app to take a shot at wordy snippets, though. Others have tried to build\u00a0an \u2018Instagram for book quotes\u2019 \u2014\u00a0Quotle<\/a>, for example\u00a0\u2014 but no one has yet managed to generate\u00a0significant momentum for the concept. It might be because sharing book snippets\u00a0is inherently more niche than sharing photos (it\u2019s certainly more bounded, given language barriers). Or because\u00a0no one has made a slick enough version to attract more mainstream appeal.<\/p>\n Postepic\u2019s v2\u00a0app seems to beat\u00a0Quotle on OCR speed. And because it\u2019s\u00a0chosen to fix the sharing format as a square its content inherently feels better\u00a0groomed for social sharing vs the more wordy\/text-heavy Quotle. (Although, on the flip side, Postepic\u2019s ease of use and more formulaic format might attract a flood of clich\u00e9 sharers and drive down the quality of discoverable quotes.) But clearly the founders\u2019 hope is that the uniform sharing\u00a0format sets\u00a0Postepic up to benefit from viral uplift if users share\u00a0watermarked\u00a0quotes to their larger follower bases on platforms like\u00a0Instagram (as other apps have<\/a>). Time will tell if they can make it catch on.<\/p>\n It\u2019s certainly still\u00a0a fairly unformed thing at this stage, especially given the size and nature of its\u00a0early adopter community \u2014 having only clocked a few thousand downloads for its MVP v1 via a launch on\u00a0Product Hunt. So even though the team has curated a bunch of quotations themselves to populate the app, you\u2019re more likely to find quotes\u00a0about scaling a startup than lines from a Shakespearean sonnet. But the core function of v2 has been executed\u00a0well, within a clear\u00a0app structure. So it\u2019s super simple to capture, edit and share nicely presented quotes.<\/p>\n Quotation length\u00a0is capped at 600\u00a0characters to ensure readability (and curtail any copyright concerns). Photo backgrounds are also limited to a handful of\u00a0generic shots and textures offered within the app \u2014 at least for now, to avoid users uploading inappropriate imagery, says Konofalski (on that front,\u00a0remember Secret?<\/a>). While the OCR tech supports ten languages at this point: Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.<\/p>\n The app also lets you tag quotations for subject matter\u00a0and to\u00a0add sources (a requirement if you\u2019re making a quote public). Using these labels\u00a0you can then browse and search quotes, while a favorites\u00a0feature lets you curate a like-list if you spot quotes shared by others that you like.\u00a0And if you don\u2019t want to share the\u00a0quotes you create with the crowd you don\u2019t have to \u2014 you can keep individual quotes private and just use the app to create an organized, visual library of the best bits from the books you\u2019re reading.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n On the community front, the main feed of Postepic is an assorted jumble for now, showing a stream of non-topic sorted \u2018trending\u2019 quotes that Konofalski says turns over every few hours based on what others are liking. Currently there\u2019s no way to follow other users to customize what you see here but that\u2019s down to\u00a0how nascent the community is. \u201cOur goal is to offer a solution that many content and photo sharing apps use: to give users a choice to pick their favorite genres and authors to adjust their feed,\u201d he says. \u201cAdditionally, we want to launch a functionality of following other users, so their posts show up in user\u2019s feed\u2026 [but]\u00a0decided to postpone the functionality\u2026 until we reach a community size that would warrant this.\u201d<\/p>\n Postepic does also support social sharing to other platforms, as you\u2019d expect. Though this doesn\u2019t always\u00a0work as you\u2019d imagine.\u00a0For example, testing sharing to WhatsApp the app merely\u00a0created a generic text message with a link to view the quote in Postepic, rather than including the visual form of the\u00a0quote in a WhatsApp message template (though this is likely a WhatsApp restriction on sharing from a third party app). A basic workaround is obviously to screengrab a quote and upload it manually where you like as a photo. Sharing to Twitter incorporated both the image and a text message with a link when I tested it. Konofalski says that with most \u201cwell known apps\u201d it will\u00a0automatically import\/drop an image into\u00a0the other app.<\/p>\n The app\u00a0is free to download (and iOS only for now), and while the team says it has a few\u00a0ideas for potential monetization down the line \u2014 such as hosting\u00a0pre-launch book campaigns, or offering writers a subscription-based platform to connect with fans \u2014 the focus for now\u00a0is fully on building up the size of the community to try to reach a \u201ccritical mass\u201d of readers.<\/p>\n Does generation Snapchat read books? I guess they\u2019ll soon find out\u2026<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/RSSPoster_PRO\/cache\/89610_p1050441.jpg?resize=640%2C428&ssl=1\")
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