EDITORIAL: Streaming Reading?

Long ago, I signed up to the then-independent service LoveFilm, which soon became an amazon company. The lure was obvious; any DVD sent straight to your home, no late fees. For a film glutton like myself, this was a must-have. I continued with this service until earlier this year, when even posting DVDs seemed like a bit of a chore, and I converted to Netflix, the all-you-can-eat buffet of streaming TV. Recently my wife discovered Spotify, the music streaming service which means she never needs to buy a CD again. A music fan since birth, she now streams music via her phone all day, a lifesaver when she was in hospital for a month.

And so I found myself looking around at my shelves of books and wondering if I would ever do the same to them. When we got a Kindle, we downloaded any classics we could find for free and chucked the hard copies. It would be cost prohibitive to do that for all the books in my house, but what if I could stream them for a monthly fee? Would I? Would you?

Wattpad is the current website which is causing a buzz in the lit community. Authors can upload chapters for users to read for free, even entire books. As part of a community, readers can comment and link with writers, but why would writers do this with their valuable manuscripts?

Friend of StoryWorld Jeff Norton addressed this on his blog when he uploaded his book Metawars: Fight for the Future to Wattpad:

I approached my publisher, Orchard Books (part of the Hachette family) with the idea of putting the first of the four MetaWars books on wattpad to build the fan base for the series. Since MetaWars is published around the world, but not yet in the U.S., it felt like a sensible experiment to get the story in front of more readers.  I must give Orchard & Hachette credit for being willing to experiment with me.  It would’ve been easy for them to say no, and I certainly wasn’t going to do it without their blessing; but since we’ll all living through the digital transformation together, I’m glad to have the publisher onside for the learning.

Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller, tweeted to me: “interesting idea, what do you hope to get out of it?”

A good question from an incisive mind.

I tweeted back: “global reach; meeting teen readers where they are; & generating excitement for the series. The community is so vibrant.”

I’ve signed up to Wattpad now and am going to jump in feet first to see what the reading experience is like. I’m hoping it will be a friendly, supportive community, because if this really is the future of reading, then us writers better get ready to mingle with the wattpadders online.

image: http://www.freeimages.com/profile/adassel