Progressive Web Apps -- a platform agnostic solution for ebook readers

How Progressive Web Apps Are Shaping the Future of Ebook Readers

by Harikrishna Kundariya

In recent times, the whole process of digital content access and consumption has gone through a great transformation. One of the tools that many people around the globe use for reading is ebook readers. With Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) emerging, a new dimension has been added to the future ebook reading experience, presenting a seamless, responsive, and immersive experience in an easy format that can easily adapt to a variety of devices and environments. In reality, PWAs are presenting ebook sites with the much-needed opportunity to revolutionize reading experiences while filling the gap that has thus been formed between websites and native mobile apps.

This article delves into how Progressive Web Apps are revolutionizing the future of ebook readers and categorizes the features and benefits that may dictate the course of ebook consumption into the future.

What Are Progressive Web Apps?

Progressive Web Apps represent native app experiences delivered through web-based applications without reliance on native technologies from mobile or computers. Like regular websites, PWAs run instantly, support all devices for responsiveness, load offline, and can be accessed directly from any device's home screen without user interaction with app stores. PWAs are fast and reliable, with app-like performance, making the experience engaging, even in situations where there is little or no internet.

Seamless user experience on multiple devices

PWA provides the ebooks an experience of reading as if it were a native application. They assure smooth cross-device functionality, hence an ebook reader can read anywhere at any time on any smartphone, tablet, or desktop. Unlike native apps, these work across all platforms without having to download and install separate applications from stores. They thus save users from managing multiple apps to enjoy an uninterrupted reading of their ebook library. The Progressive Web App will be platform-agnostic, ensuring reading is accessible and convenient on all devices with a consistent responsive experience.

Offline Access and Synchronization

The biggest challenge ebook platforms faced was uninterrupted reading when there was no internet. In this respect, PWAs stand out, because they are built to be offline-capable. By using the service, the background scripts run on top of a webpage, without disrupting its functionality—PWAs can cache all the needed assets, including ebook files, to ensure that the users can keep reading even if there's no access to the internet.

This will make it possible to keep reading from your favorite series while you're traveling, as you are when commuting, even when connectivity might be spotty or unavailable for your ebook reader. Once connectivity comes back online, you will automatically update in the cloud and find what you've been reading synced throughout all of your devices. This level of convenience upgrades the whole user experience, which is why PWAs become an excellent option for ebook platforms looking forward to offering flexible and uninterrupted reading.

Optimized Speed and Performance

Ebooks must be fast and performant, and PWAs guarantee fast fluid experiences. Techniques such as caching enable them to load fast even on slower networks, reducing wait time. They are also lightweight, requiring less storage space on devices. This means they don't take a lot of storage space for content and features like native apps do; instead, they stream or cache content, thus reducing how much space will be occupied on a device without diminishing functionality. That makes PWAs very suitable for storage-limited users who want the best reading experience possible.

Engagement Features and Notifications

The ebooks can be made more enjoyable through PWAs with features like push notifications, where it notifies a user of a new release, reading milestones, or reminders to read. This makes the experience very personal and engaging because it reminds users to continue their favorite books or reminds them of events like book club meetings. This ensures that users are connected with their ebook libraries, thus bettering reading habits and engagement. Another area is push notifications, which will allow ebook platforms to be in touch with the users, hence improving retention and further use of the platform.

Low Cost and Easy Updates

Developing and maintaining native apps on each operating system is expensive and very time-consuming for ebook platforms. PWAs are relatively affordable and only need one codebase for all platforms, thereby simplifying the development process. As well, PWAs have automatic background updates, in which the user does not have to manually download updates. This means that the platform would never stop evolving because bugs can be fixed quickly and new content added the same way. With a PWA, there is a more agile ebook platform solution. The experience is streamlined and efficient for the developer and user.

Improved Discoverability and Accessibility

PWAs can significantly improve discoverability. They are especially great for markets where accessing the app stores may be difficult. The ebook platforms may send users directly to their sites to access a PWA in an instant. This improves acquisition rates and increases platform reach. Second, PWAs are friendlier to people with disabilities because they can be developed based on web technologies that support a screen reader and adjustable fonts besides offering high-contrast themes. This makes ebooks much more accessible to everyone, closer to reaching an even wider cross-section of a population for reading books even with visually impaired populations.

Future of Ebook Readers with PWAs

PWAs will definitely change the game in the digital reading world, making it much more accessible, performance-wise, and engaging. An ebook will generate an amazing load-time experience due to cross-device capability, offline capability, and push notifications, which will take readers anywhere they want, at any time, to read their favorite titles with flexibility, responsiveness, and immersion. As ebook platforms adopt PWAs, they will change the face of digital content consumption, making it easier and more accessible on any device so that the next generation of readers can find content easily.

In a nutshell, the influence of Progressive Web Apps on ebook readers is just tremendous. They are flexible, high-performance, and engaging in fulfilling the needs of today's digital readers while making development easier and discoverability better. More ebook platforms embracing PWAs will make ebook reading faster, more accessible, and more enjoyable than ever before.

Reports:

Article contributed by Harikrishna Kundariya

Biography:- Harikrishna Kundariya, a marketer, developer, IoT, Cloud & AWS savvy, co-founder, Director of eSparkBiz Technologies. His 12+ years of experience enables him to provide digital solutions to new start-ups based on IoT and SaaS applications.

Should AI make Authors Lives Easier?

Can an AI be a useful tool for authors, or a crutch that prevents an author from using their own judgement and enhancing their writing skills. Can AI give us agency, or rob us of it? No doubt the answer is both or either. Independent author expert Joanne Penn raises this interesting topic, with the assistance of Grok, the resident AI on X. I suspect the main problem will be (or already is) the absolute tidal wave of AI enabled and initiated content that will wash through the publishing world, much of which will be complete forgettable rubbish. The desire of most readers to read stories about humans for humans may be a difficult one to satisfy. Amplifying the already near-infinite supply of content will not assist with the long-term problem of declining readership. With many people welded to their phones and compulsively watching extremely short-form videos, the sight of a person reading an actual book or even an e-reader is rare enough to be remarkable.

Draft2Digital: a good idea for independent authors?

Draft2Digital offers a very cost-effective distribution route for ebooks (print on demand also, but that service is still in beta, for various reasons). Its sale channels cover all of the large ebook retailers. It has a very simple and attractive service proposition:

We are Self-Publishing with Support. Your book is your priority. Our priority is you. We build tools and services that let you focus on writing while we take care of layout, publishing, distribution, print-on-demand paperbacks, and more. Keep writing. We’re here for the rest.

In a long and very informative blog post, author services firm Reedsy describes them as “The gold standard for self-publishing aggregators, Draft2Digital distinguishes itself with excellent customer service and a user-friendly interface. They’re the best way to sell your book with dozens of retailers without tearing your hair out.”

Kindlepreneur also has a largely positive review that dives into the details of uploading a new title and how the royalty payments and update fees work.

Users discuss vcry specific pros and cons of the service on a reddit thread. Important note: the 10% Draft2Digital fee is charged on retail price, not on profit, and comes on top of the share taken by the end seller.

Writers Weekly has published a number of very negative user reviews that indicate some administrative problems.

• Plenty of users had complaints about the non-payment of royalties.

• Draft2Digital books cannot access Amazon advertising or other Amazon sales tools.

In summary, a service that will be useful to many authors, but go in with your eyes open and aware of the moderate drawbacks, especially the Amazon advertising issue.

K-Lytics

If you are serious about optimising your online presence as an author, K-Lytics is worth checking out. Their site asks the following rhetorical question:

“Do you want to sell more books, face less competition, and achieve a higher return on your publishing investments?”

— K-Lytics

Their paid market reports burrow into the details of hundreds of genres and micro-genres. Seeing the maths underneath the book markets is a bit disconcerting, but in a world governed by algorithms and visibility, these insights are essential. The specificity of some of the genres and sub-genres is almost comic: Scottish Romance (what about Scottish Time Travelling Romance?); Cosy Mystery; Urban Fantasy, etc.

“You do not have to be afraid of numbers. We will help you to understand and use them to your advantage.”

— K-Lytics

Get Your Title Onto Borrowbox via IngramSpark

Bolinda Audio produces a book-borrowing app (Borrowbox) used widely by Australian libraries. An author client contacted them recently to see if there was a way of including their ebook title on the platform. They responded promptly with the following:

“We would be happy to distribute your titles to libraries via our digital lending solution BorrowBox, but we simply don't have the resources to deal direct with individual authors. If your titles are available from a digital distributor such as Gardners, Ingrams, IPG, or Faber Factory, then we could make them available via BorrowBox.”

Borrowbox is an excellent app with a very wide variety of audiobook and ebook titles, and represents an great opportunity for independent authors to get in front of new readers.

A New Series for Peter Ralph

Writer of financial thrillers Peter Ralph is embarking on a new series featuring Josh Kennelly, a character first introduced in Fog City Fraud. The first book, Deadly Bequests is “set in New Orleans and is a scam about the elderly getting fleeced via their wills.”. The second book is The Guardians . Josh “receives a crazy call from a veteran of the Afghanistan war claiming that his father has been kidnapped by a guardian. Reluctantly, Josh gets involved and discovers the guardianship industry where judges, guardians, lawyers, and doctors, look after themselves, but not their wards. The forces that he’s trying to expose are all-powerful. Has he bitten off more than he can chew?”

We designed all three books to have a consistent identity and repeated elements.

Fatal Path Cover — More Iterations

An update on an earlier post — two more iterations on this cover. Sometimes it is a long and winding road to a final cover…

Bookbub Speaks, Advises

An author client recently got in touch with ebook promotional giant Bookbub to discuss the disappointing performance of a paid ad posted on that platform. He received the following interesting response, worth reading in full for anyone considering using the service or applying for the oly grail of a featured deal (as with so many areas of the Internet, Bookbub is overwhelmingly dominant in its space):

Thanks for reaching out! I'm sorry to hear your recent ad campaign didn't produce the results you were hoping for. I'll note that it does require quite a bit of testing and tweaking to develop ad campaigns that get the results you're looking for. When getting started with ads, we recommend that partners spend some time committed to testing ads with small budgets of $5-$10. Generally, you're unlikely to see a positive return immediately out of the gate with no testing.

I'd encourage you to read through some of our blog posts to get more familiar with BookBub Ads. I've gone ahead and listed a few that I think you'll find helpful below:

- First, you can find a blog post on increasing your click-through rate here: https://insights.bookbub.com/increase-click-through-rate-bookbub-ads-campaign/
- Next, you can read about how marketing goals affect BookBub ad campaigns here: https://insights.bookbub.com/how-marketing-goals-affect-bookbub-ad-campaigns-infographic/
- Finally, you can view our ultimate guide to BookBub Ads here: https://insights.bookbub.com/ultimate-guide-bookbub-ads/#getting-started

If you want to learn more about BookBub Ads, I'd suggest that you read through some other posts in the BookBub Ads section of our blog here for more tutorials, campaign ideas, and best practices.

I'm happy to answer any questions your have around Featured Deals:
1.) Currently, we rarely feature new releases in our daily emails. We’ve found that books that have had a chance to build up their platform perform best and, therefore, make for the most successful promotions for our partners.
2.) Your promotion's length is completely up to you and your marketing goals. You're welcome to discount your book for just a day, or a whole week or more if you'd like. We happen to have a blog post that discusses what promotion lengths work best for different marketing goals here. I hope you find that post helpful!
3.) Critical reviews play a role in our editor's selection process, so it would certainly be helpful for your title to have some reviews associated with it. You're absolutely welcome to submit this book for consideration, but please note that, as mentioned above, we tend to feature books that have built up their platform. If you're interested, you can learn more about the editorial team's selection process here.

Bookbub is not for Babies

Many authors have never heard of Bookbub. The service is essentially a regular email offering selected discounted ebooks to a massive subscriber list. Most of the titles promoted therein are from major publishers, but a significant fraction are from independent authors and small publishers. Publishers and authors pay over $600 per title just to be considered for inclusion in their featured deals. They are extremely powerful in the world of ebook sales and massively profitable.

Peter Ralph has done a stellar job analysing the performance of bookbub and advising authors how to get one of the sought after featured deals. Other bloggers have useful posts about setting up effective ads for Bookbub, Others point out that while the sales spike created by bookbub is real and substantial, it can be rather short lived. This author suggests that the real benefit of being featured on bookbub is exposing the rest of your published work to a new audience.

In a world where bookstores, though gamely hanging on, represent a decreasing fraction of overall print sales (not to mention ebooks and audibooks), authors have to come to terms with the necessary techniques for online sales success, and letting the market know they even exist.

Inside Kindle — Analysing Sales and Market Data

An interesting webinar staged by Reedsy on the dynamics/underlying principles of the Kindle webstore. With an astonishing 70,000 titles published per month (!) independent authors really need to understand the platforms to which they are uploading their titles. While it may be dispiriting to see one’s book chunked into tiny little categories and subject to algorithmic vagaries, there is also power in exploiting this really quite remarkable flood of sales data.

“With 70,000+ books being published each month, you need tools and strategies to help you and your book stand out from the crowd. Knowing your market is the essential first step.”

Why Vary Ebook Pricing?

One of the distinctive aspects of ebook publishing is the willingness of authors and publishers to vary book pricing. Some of this may be an attempt to find the ideal price for a given book, but others are following a more sophisticated playbook, a little like the strategies employed by airlines with ticket sales. Kindle itself has Kindle Countdown Deals, though there are built in limits to the use of this particular tool. PublishDrive makes the following observation:

“Writing an ebook is hard. Pricing it should not be harder. Ebook pricing, however, can often feel like a maze without exits. It is easy to get lost or confused. With the following ebook pricing guide we would like to help beginners and seasoned publishers to find their way out.”

And WriteHacked has a long post on the topic spelling out all of the options and reasoning behind them

Smashwords versus Draft 2 Digital

The ebook landscape is dominated by Amazon Kindle, but there is a world of ebook consumption beyond Jeff Bezos’ realm. Smashwords aggregates together a number of ebook selling services as does its newer competitor Draft2Digital. Kindlepreneur has done yeoman’s work in comparing the two services in detail, even going to the trouble of contacting their respective CEOs. Spoiler alert: Draft2Digital wins!

The Rise of the Independent Author

The book of the future was supposed to be an amazing digital, virtual thing, anticipated eagerly by every second futurist, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way. An interesting article in Wired about how we got to the current ebook landscape (hint: involves an all conquering behemoth named after a big river). And print books are still a thing, thank goodness. And here’s an interesting quote for all the independent authors out there:

“Almost half of author earnings now come from independently published books. Independent books don’t outsell big-five books, but they offer higher royalty rates—roughly 70 percent versus 25 percent.”

— Craig Mod, writing in Wired Magazine

When a Box is not a Box

Peter Ralph writes fast-moving financial thrillers. Recently he wanted to bundle together three of his ebooks to sell as one unit. Though the books are packets of digital information, they are promoted online as physical objects, as if they were an actual ‘box’ set. So we created a graphic showing the three cased books in all their virtual/physical glory.

Bookbub Explained

Bestselling author Peter J. Ralph has turned his considerable research skills to the secrets behind the most successful promoter of ebooks, Bookbub. Our cover was intended to illustrate the dramatic effect that being selected for the Bookbub newsletter can have on the sales of a particular title. Typefaces used are League Gothic and Marianina.

Four Minimalist Covers — Book Design

Four covers for the same publisher, each under the same imprint. All yellow backgrounds, strong, simple typography, minimal image content. There is much to be said for paring design back to its absolute essentials. Less clutter, less distraction, more emphasis on the content and the beauty of typography. Typefaces used include League Gothic, Clarendon Bold Condensed and Bell Gothic Black.

You Go, Books!

Printed books seem have unexpected staying power. The growth of the ebook segment of the market has slowed dramatically, and independent bookstores have experienced a modest expansion, both in terms of the number of stores and overall sales. Readers cite the tactile aspect of the printed word, along with the aesthetics of a good bookshelf. Not that the digital revolution hasn't changed the book trade — at least 40% of all book sales are now online.

Free Scholarly ebooks

From the ever-active folk at Open Culture, a very long list of free ebooks, many of them the greats of world literature and intellectual endeavour. From Wittgenstein to David Foster Wallace — a lifetime's reading awaits...

An Unlikely Hero — Cover Design

Dudley Sims is an unassuming man catapulted into a key role in resisting a rapacious land developer. His escapades and love interests are chronicled in The Confessions of Dudley Sims by Brian Smith. We wanted to capture the feel of the riverine landscape he defends in the story – the murky but beautiful Yarra River. Along the base of the cover parades a low-key protest, complete with dog.

First Aid for Parents — Book Cover

Keeping small children safe is a full-time occupation for parents. The ability of a toddler to get into trouble involving sharp objects, flights of stairs, hot water, bookshelves, food, animals and so on is genuinely amazing. Michelle Fiddian has written a very helpful introductory guide outlining both strategies for protecting little ones and acting quickly if accidents do occur. Published by Jo Jo Publishing. We wanted to show the vulnerability of the very young, using crisp, clean type. Title set in Trend Sans, subtitle in Mostra Nuova.