23 Mobile Things #12: Books, Books, & More Books

I first heard about Wattpad late last year, when reading Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, but the description in the book hadn't really given me a good sense of how the site worked—something about a social network of readers and writers, fanfics and self-published works. Now I had an excuse to look at it closely.

The Wattpad app itself is easy to use: install, set up an account, choose a few favorite genres, and start reading. Mind you, the app started off by recommending books in genres like Romance and Adventure that I had specifically not listed as ones I'm interested in. (This probably won't be your go-to app for reader's advisory.) I hadn't realized that Wattpad had out-of-copyright classics as well as modern writing—I may finally get around to reading "The Picture of Dorian Gray." If you're comfortable reading on a tablet (I haven't tried Wattpad's iPhone app yet), you'll be fine reading things on Wattpad. The font is clear and navigation is intuitive.

Wattpad is a social network as well as a reading app, which will take some getting used to on my part. I mean, Amazon is sort of trying to promote social reading by giving you the option of making your Kindle notes and highlighting public, but Wattpad goes far beyond this (perhaps this is why Amazon acquired Goodreads). Naturally, the app offers you the standard option of inviting your friends from other social networks to come join you. I'm guessing that if I did have friends on Wattpad, the news feed would be showing me what they're up to, and not just Wattpad's recommendations for what to read next. But I'm used to this sort of thing from being on LibraryThing and Goodreads. What I'm not accustomed to is social networking practically written into the text itself. The book I chose was peppered with comment counts (this is the part that's sort of like the Kindle option of seeing what other readers have highlighted). Intrigued, I clicked through on a few of them. Some comments were about how much the readers were enjoying the book, some were asking for clarification on one point or another, some were offering editorial advice. The author was participating in the discussion at points, which has the potential to be really interesting. But I also found the discussions distracting, because I had to stop reading the book itself to read the comments. It's like trying to listen to the commentary on a DVD and watch it simultaneously—I have to commit to one or the other, not both. And completely unlike LibraryThing, Goodreads, or Kindle, Wattpad invites you to write your own stories. One tap on the Create icon, and a blank screen with keyboard appears: no obstacles between you and the muse. Whoa.

Okay, this is another app I'll be hanging onto for a while to explore further. Unfortunately, Wattpad hasn't solved the problem of how to find the good stories in these millions of self-published works, and it'll probably take me a while before I trip over one on my own. Not surprisingly, I can't see any use for this app in a law library. If someone wanted to read fanfiction, Wattpad can certainly deliver it to them. Do patrons ask to read self-published works that aren't fanfics? I'd think that reading the library's e-books might be more satisfying simply because most of them will have been edited at some point in the publication process. Of course, if the patron wants the social networking experience while reading, then they're probably going to want something like Wattpad, or maybe Goodreads or LibraryThing. (Yes, the perennial question: What do patrons want?)

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Another free source of fanfiction is Archive of Our Own (AO3). This isn't an app, but the site can be bookmarked on a tablet or smartphone. It has a much better search engine than Wattpad, allowing you to specify precisely what you're looking for. Membership is required to comment on works or create your own, but you don't need to be a member to read the stories.

23 Mobile Things #11: Library & Reference

I've been using the St. Paul Public Library's mobile app for a few years now. It seems to have gotten a new color scheme in the past few days: nicer to look at aesthetically, and easier to read. I mainly use it for the catalog, to see if the library owns a specific book I want, usually one that I've thought of when I'm out and about and realize that I could pick up if it's available. The mobile catalog isn't designed for browsing; you can search by title or author, but that's it. I pulled up a record and clicked on one of its subject headings to see if that would take me anywhere, but no. One of the app's options is a button to take you to the main catalog, which is good, although that would be more useful on a tablet. On my phone, I could tell I was looking at the catalog, but it would have taken a lot of zooming in and out to make use of it (I'm feeling seasick at the very thought).

But, okay, for this Thing, I should probably look at all those other button in the app, the ones I usually don't use.

• My Account: Indeed, that's what this is. Oh, and I can use this to renew the one book I have out. Nifty.
• Library Locator: A good idea, especially if you're out and about and are struck by a need to visit the closest branch of the library. It needs to be tweaked for focus, though. It asked if it could use my location, then listed every branch, without any indication of which ones I was the closest to.
• Ask A Librarian: Ooh, lots of options, and two of them ("Email Us" and "Call Us") can be done with just a click through my phone. Excellent! Too bad I don't have anything to ask a librarian right now, or I could test the system more thoroughly.
• E-books and Audiobooks Available Now: OverDrive, 3M Cloud Library, and OneClickdigital, all there and ready for me to access them. You'd need to know exactly what book you want, or you'd drain your phone's battery scrolling through endless lists trying to find something, but if you do, this is a convenient way to pick up more reading material when you're away from home and your library.
• New Books for Adults, Teens, Kids: Yes, that's what they are. Again, one can search the list rather than scroll.
• BookLook @ ISBN search: This lets you scan the barcode of a book in a bookstore or that a friend is reading, or whatever, and tells you whether or not the library has it. A great idea, although the results can be confusing. I got a hit for the book I test-scanned, but then it said no copies were available and didn't let me reserve one. I'm guessing this means all the copies were lost or stolen. If that's the case, please don't get my hopes up by telling me the library owns the book.
• Research: Databases. Got it.
• Events & Classes: Exactly.
• Metrowide Calendar: Events and classes at other Twin Cities libraries, I think.
• Facebook Connect with us: Find them on Facebook...
• Follow us on Twitter @stpaullibrary: ...and Twitter.
• Metrowide Libraries: Locations of the branches of other Twin Cities libraries. Wait...it can tell me I'm 4.7 miles from the Hosmer Library (Hennepin County Library), but it can't tell me which branch of my own library is closest with the Library Locator?! Luckily, the St. Paul Public Library is listed here too, so now I can see which branch I'm currently closest to. Sheesh.

Lots of services in a fairly simple app. I really must use this more.

23 Mobile Things #10: Sharing Photos

For this Thing, I tackled Instagram. I knew I knew at least one person who uses Instagram; I couldn't think of anyone who uses Snapchat. Besides, I don't need my pictures to self-destruct in five seconds.

Instagram has been pretty easy to set up and to use. As it turned out, I know 22 people on Instagram, although it looks like only three of them use it with any regularity. This may be another one of the social media sites that people sign up for out of curiosity and then never get into the habit of using. But this gave me a good start for people to follow, and a few of the 22 have even followed me back. Oh, my soaring popularity!

What little I knew of Instagram before signing up had left me wondering what the point was. It's hard for me not to think of it as visual Twitter—that is, if you created Twitter, but you had people post a photo instead of  a sentence or two, you'd have Instagram. And hey, there are a lot of people out there who are just as visual as they are verbal, or more so, and maybe that was all there was to it. So I hadn't figured I needed to join, because I like Twitter, and the few times I've wanted to post pictures, it's been easy to do. It's not as easy to post photos to Facebook, but it's not horrendously complicated either. But yeah, I can see now that it's just that much easier to do so through Instagram: take the photo, edit it, add captions and commentary, and direct it to Twitter, Facebook, and/or other destinations, all from within the Instagram app.

I'm happy to say that Instagram has motivated me to use my phone camera more. I still plan to take most of the pictures for my blogs with my digital camera, because I want them to be higher quality, but Instagram encourages quick pics to be shared on impulse with friends, which is perfect for the phone camera. And since I finally have a phone camera that can take decent pictures without a lot of fuss, using Instagram is more feasible than it was in the past. So I'm liking it much more than I thought I would, and I'm leaning towards continuing to use it after I've finished this post. But I'm still a bit concerned about that overlap. How many more general social media networks can the world support, anyway? Perhaps Instagram is different enough from Facebook and Twitter by dint of its photos-first focus to survive and thrive. We'll see.

Professionally, this is another app/service I can't see much use for. Everything I've read says that currently Instagram is hot with teenagers and college students, an age range not known for using law libraries. Indeed, a libraries-and-social-media webinar I attended last year stated bluntly that if teenagers weren't a major patron group for your library, don't bother getting your library on Instagram. Of course, if Instagram is one of the social media networks that endures, its users will age. Some of them will eventually become first law students, then lawyers, and then maybe we'll use it to reach them then [insert evil cackle here].

23 Mobile Things #9: Taking & Editing Photos

I do not use my tablet and smartphone for everything, at least not yet. When it comes to photos, I'm more likely to export them to a desktop computer and edit them with Photoshop Elements rather than try to fix a photo that I can barely see on a tiny screen. And since I do edit photos a lot, I decided to try Color Splurge for this Thing's post, just for a change.

Color Splurge makes photos look dramatic, or makes dramatic photos, or something like that. I could see using it to create a library poster or two, highlighting key elements by coloring them. You'd have to use it sparingly though, because it's such a distinctive look. Even two posters in a row featuring this technique would probably give your patrons the impression that you and your staff only had one design idea. I'm not sure how much use there would be for Color Splurge's color change tools, at least not for library posters. I don't know, maybe if you were playing off of "roses are red, violets are blue" and wanted a photo of red violets or blue roses or something—beyond that, my professional imagination fails me. But I can think of reasons to use it personally. For one thing, I often want to knit a sweater in some other color than the one pictured in the pattern. With this, I could recolor the photo and check out how it looks before committing myself to anything.

Color Splurge itself was fairly easy to use. The instructional video saved me a lot of guesswork, but the ads are obnoxious. (Also, the video needs updating. Where was that reset button the narrator referred to?) It was a bit tricky getting the color and the gray to be where I wanted them to be. I have better control of my fingers than trying to "paint" with a mouse or trackball, but my fingertips are less than precise when working at such a small scale. It was certainly easier using this app on a tablet than a smartphone—having said that, I'll add that I did these two pictures on the iPhone. It wasn't all that hard after I remembered I had a stylus and used it. Although Color Splurge may have been overkill for these pictures. The reason I took them in the first place was because they were the only spots of color in otherwise dormant lawns and bushes; all Color Splurge did was change brown to gray.

Leaves!

Really, there are tiny purple flowers in there somewhere.

23 Mobile Things #8: Social Media Management Tools

You know, I'd sort of forgotten that the point of HootSuite is to manage multiple social media accounts. I suspect this is because my social media accounts don't need much managing. While I'm on several social networking sites, I'm on many of them for some other reason than socializing. (Usually databases.) Of the ones I use for socializing, I've only linked Facebook and Twitter to HootSuite. I imagine disaster is inevitable if I connect LinkedIn to anything I use in my personal life.

In general, I should probably use HootSuite more, especially for Facebook. When I first started using it, its bare-bones interface just didn't do it for me aesthetically. But nowadays, Facebook has gotten more and more cluttered with ads that I can pretty much ignore in HootSuite. Worse, its insistance on wanting to show me "top stories" is annoying as all get-out. Even when I switch to showing most recent stories first, it keeps asking me if I wouldn't really prefer top stories, and every few days it switches back to top stories on its own. HootSuite's default is chronological order. I may learn to love that bare-bones interface after all.

But merely reading Twitter and Facebook is standard. Social media management tools need to do more, and HootSuite does. I like that HootSuite lets you post to Twitter and Facebook simultaneously, although I don't use this feature all that much. This might be a more useful feature if I wanted to post the same stuff to three or more social networks, but it's not that much effort to post something in one network, and then copy and paste it to the other. And I don't often post the same things to Twitter and Facebook. There's some overlap between the two, of course, but not that much, and what I want to say to friends (Facebook) is rarely what I want to say to strangers (Twitter). But when I have used this feature, it's been easy to use.

Another selling point for me is that HootSuite has analytics. I love analytics: charts! graphs! trends! It's too bad that my social media life is so unexciting that the analytics don't show much, but the point is that they could. And it would be really neat to look at, I'm sure. I need to go do something interesting online so that I have cool analytics to admire.

HootSuite also lets you write status updates and tweets ahead of time and schedule them for later posting. I've probably used this feature more than any other. It's such a sensible feature that I keep being mildly surprised that neither Twitter nor Facebook has added it to their services. I haven't gotten the hang of AutoSchedule yet, but I'm in no rush—again, I probably don't have enough to say to justify its use.

I don't see myself using HootSuite professionally any time soon. I don't work with my library's social media, and we only have a Twitter account anyway. You don't need a social media management tool when you barely have any social media to manage. But it's been useful personally and I plan to keep using it for the foreseeable future.

23 Mobile Things #7: Content Saving & Sharing

In the interests of continued learning, being open to new experiences, and needing something to write about for this Thing, I joined Pinterest. I can't say as it has won me over yet, although I haven't deleted my account either.

Okay, so Pinterest is still yet another way to save information. Saving information is a good and wonderful thing, but I don't need zillions of ways to do so, any more than I need three digital personal assistants, because then I have to remember which service is storing which bit of information. If I were more primarily visual, though, Pinterest might be my favorite information saver. The pictures are the focus and there's very little text involved. I could see using it if I were collecting ideas for a visual project, like how to redecorate a room, remodel my kitchen, or plan a wedding. But generally, I save things for the text more than the graphics, and I find Evernote or even Springpad better for that. Also, I think Pinterest is just messy. Faced with a screen of small pictures and little text, I can't find a focal point on the page and I mostly just want to click away from it, not use it. This is a service in desperate need of more white space.

Like Zite and Springpad, Pinterest wants to send new ideas my way. Since signing up, I've been getting regular emails from Pinterest encouraging me to follow some boards and find more things to pin. I'm becoming increasingly curious about what this says about people generally. Do we feel we don't know enough? Are falling behind somehow and need to catch up? Are just really curious about what the people we follow are up to? Anyway, even though this doesn't interest me, I'm sure it's a fine feature for those who want to take advantage of it.

I don't see myself using Pinterest professionally in the near future. I work at a law library: the kind of library infamous for having lots of books that look exactly alike. With Pinterest's visual emphasis, I don't know what exactly we could show off. An entire board devoted to books with tan covers and red and black stripes on the spines—ooh! :)

in-between thing: microsoft office app for ipad

Last night, a mere day after writing up Mobile Thing #6,  I learned that Microsoft is releasing a version of Office for the iPad, which was confirmed this morning: Microsoft to Offer Office for iPad, Maybe a Bit Late. At first I was relieved that I wouldn't have to see if CloudOn fixes its problems. What better to play with Office than Office itself? Then I saw the catch: read all the documents you want for free, but if you want to make any, you'll have to subscribe to Office 365: $100/year.

You know how I said I'd given up on accessing Office documents on my iPad? You can still consider it given up.