Creating things on the web has started to become easier to do with the help of some of the amazing web tools and apps that are out there. One area that seems like it is becoming more prominent on the web is eBook and magazine creation. When books and eBooks first came out, publishing was somewhat of a pipe dream unless you had a great book or you knew how to get it published, which meant that it wouldn’t be able to get in front of a lot of people. Now, with the web, book creation and content distribution is a lot easier to do. That is not to take away from people who work hard on their own to get published, but the web is providing a platform for the average person to be able to get more exposure to their writing than before.
Today, I am taking a look at a web application that offers the mass market of people the ability to create their own ebook/magazine. Blooki.st gives people a platform where they can easily create content on the web so that it can be distributed to the world. They aren’t the first web app to do this, and they most certainly won’t be the last, but there was something about how clean and easy it looked to use that I thought I had to just try it out for myself.
Creating Your Book
When you are ready to make your first book on Blooki.st, there are three different types that you can choose from, portfolio/story, journal, or poetry book. After you decide on which one to go with, you are presented with a title page, where you give your book a title and a background image. Here you can also decide whether you want to make your book private or public.
Creating your title page
Now you are ready to create the content that you want to put in your book. There are two different types of pages that you can include; one is an article, where you can add a title, text, as well as one picture above. Secondly, you can choose to have a photo post, where you can upload a picture and then give it a caption. Other than that, there is not much else to it. When you are done creating your book, you can then make it public to share with others or just keep it private to yourself.
Adding content to your book
Sharing and Interacting With Your Book
If you decide to make it public so that others can see it, there are a couple of different ways to share it with people. First, there is a Twitter and Facebook icon in which you can share your book to those social networks. Secondly, you can take the url of the book and email that to your friends and family so they can read the book as well.
Sharing your book to Twitter
One nice feature they have to interact with others is that you can write comments on someone’s book to give them feedback or to let them know your thoughts on it. If you like an author or want to keep up on their writing, you can choose to follow their books and you will be able to see when they update their writings.
Collection of other books that I follow
Simple To Use
The word that kept coming to mind as I was using Blooki.st was simple. To some degree, that is a good and not so good thing for this app. For the good perspective, the simpleness of creating your own book was nice in that it didn’t take a lot of work to actually just start getting down your thoughts or writing. You didn’t have to worry about fonts, article layout or anything that would make it harder to use. You simply set a cover page, and then you could start adding your content. For a writer that is a nice thing to do as I hate having to worry about all the other details about design and it looking good. I just want to start writing and not have to think about the other stuff. Blooki.st took care of the design and layout of your book and although you don’t get much of a say in it, they actually make your posts look very nice and professional.
Book pages look professional with not much work on your part.
On the other hand, the simplicity of the app can make people a little leery of wanting to use it in the first place. People want to have control over the design, the layout, fonts, etc. I get that, and there are times when I do as well. For those people, they will take one look at Blookli.st and may be turned off instantly. There is nothing wrong with that, it just may not be what they had wanted, and that is fine.
Final Thoughts
Blookli.st is unique in that it can be used for a variety of purposes. For those that want to create content in book form and want to distribute it online, this works great for them. It can also work as a pseudo blog for others, and because of the privacy option, you can even use Blookli.st as an online journal of sorts. The app itself is free to use, and I don’t know if they have any plans for a paid version in the future. I would love to see this app come to the iPad as I think that would continue to attract users, especially in education.
The functionality, versatility, and simplicity is what is going to attract users to this app. Like I had mentioned, for some it may be a turn off because of the fact that they don’t have more control. But, if you are looking for a simple and easy to use platform to write or show off images, I would suggest you check Blookli.st out.