Love books? Love quotes from books? Love Pinterest? You’ll love Postepic.
You know that feeling when you’re reading a book and a sentence or phrase leaps out at you, it’s the most perfect string of words you’ve ever seen, it’s moved you, or made you laugh, or it contains a profound truth beautifully expressed. Until now you’ve just had to enjoy it in private, or laboriously type it out and use Canva or a similar tool if you want to make a beautiful quote out of it.
Now, though, you simply take a picture of the page with your phone camera. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology converts the image into text, so you can edit it, change the font, choose a background, and share it on social media in seconds.
As a reader, of course, this is fab: at last I can stop forcing random strangers to listen to me reading out loud paragraphs from the book I happen to be reading on the train. But I can see great potential as a marketing tool for my own books too: it will be interesting to see if publishers embrace this, or whether they’ll see the scanning bit as a threat to their intellectual property. The attraction for publishers is also that Postepic has a curated library of quotes. Whether they’ve raided a Dictionary of Quotations (like the one I compiled for Chambers back in 1996), created their own, or are taking payment from authors and publishers as a way of solving the traditional business-model problem of new apps remains to be seen…