With high-speed Internet access invading the average household, digitalisation of book publishing is fast evolving into a big business. Leveraged with new mediums and technology, digital publishing has found a new resort in social media.
Social site www.fieldi.com “goes beyond the socialising role of the run-of-the-mill social websites and opens the doors to a world of reading and publishing with unlimited interaction,” say its developers. The book text will have to be scanned as an image, page by page, in jpeg format and of uniform size for it to be uploaded onto the site.
The platform has text on varied topics, including newsletters, academic volumes, periodicals, souvenirs, anthologies and annual reports. It allows unlimited interaction between readers and writers, readers and readers, and writers and writers. “It has been just a little over a month since we started the beta version, and we have already crossed 4,000 membership,” says Mr. Biju Thomas, fieldi India spokesperson.
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Universities, colleges, research facilities, NGOs, and periodical publishing houses have joined in too, he says.
While fieldi offers reading option in Flash and Java, and is accessible through IBM and Mac machines, it would also suit tablet PCs, smart phones and cloud platforms. “When a company wants to send a newsletter to all its employees, the publishing and courier charges involved are massive. Similarly, if a researcher wants to upload his research documents and share it with others, platforms like this would be an excellent choice,” says Mr. Thomas.
Free SMS facility allows members to send the links of their favourite books to others. Auto-suggestive and manual searches are provided apart from the embed facility that allows links to be embedded in other websites. The platform can be shared through over 100 community websites, including Facebook, Twitter and Orkut.
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“The URL of the profile page will be given as QR Code, which allows the speedy conveyance of information in a code format like the bar code, thus enabling advanced mobile phones to search and share links of books,” says Mr. Thomas, adding that a three-tier security network has been established to help the site counter attacks.