There is a new e-Reading platform on the horizon that is tailored towards writers that tend to write in the very long form. Often authors will face the plight of submitting content with a high word count that leaves magazines unable to accept, blog articles being too long for peoples short attention spans and yet is too short for a full length novel.
Started by Freelance journalist Evan Ratliff and New Yorker senior editor Nick Thompson this new service will have apps on every major platform to read and purchase books from. There is an iPad and iPhone application in development that is due out January 26th, while Android and Kindle app are available soon.
This new service is tailored exclusively towards reading and giving authors a way to sell their content. This may seem simplistic, but many freelance journalists have stories that get rejected or they write in parallel with existing blog, newspaper or magazine entries they are on assignment for. The application itself is tailored towards providing a lengthy explained non-distraction interaction system for its applications. The designers researched from the standard e-reading application and designed theirs to promote the content using audio, video and designed so you can digest all of the information in small bite sized chunks.
The essence of Atavist is that is a boutique publishing house producing original nonfiction stories for digital, mobile reading devices. Atavist juxtaposes various digital forms that lies in the space between long narrative magazine articles and traditional books and e-books. Then empowers you to publish digitally and offering your stories individually — a bit like music singles in iTunes — Atavist presents stories longer and in more depth than typical magazines, less expensive and more dynamic than traditional books.
Stories on the new service will be sold for $2.99 and $1.99 on the Kindle, providing fans of the long form of non-fiction a solid investment your money.
The technology employed by the company for people to create content is called Periodic Technology. Its a content management system that allows editors, writers and people with a tale to tell to assemble their stories, add audio and video. When you create a story with this technology it is instantly available on all platforms supported by Atavist. Keep in mind, this technology is not available to everyone yet, and you must license it.
It seems at the moment the folks at Atavist are being VERY selective in the way they accept new content into its distribution system. This may be a drawback in terms of not having a ton of content to launch with, it appears from early figures they only have less then 10 stories to start with. The benefit is that it is of high quality, as opposed to just accepting anything that is thrown at them.
If you want to learn more about this exclusive project Fastcompany conducted a tremendous interview which gives a comprehensive in-depth analysis with the developers HERE.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
