Creators Of New Smartphone App Hope To Get Indians To

A startup called Juggernaut is trying to get India’s smartphone users to read more with its new e-books app, Mashable reports.
Although India has the second-largest and one of the fastest-growing smartphone markets in the world, few of its 220 million smartphone users are avid book readers.
Juggernaut is launching its app with 100 book titles, priced as low as 10 rupees (15 cents) and up to 150 rupees ($2.25). Among these, a set of serialized erotic short stories by popular Canadian-Indian star Sunny Leone has generated the most buzz. The list of authors also includes Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy, historian William Dalrymple and American businessman Rajat Gupta.
Chiki Sarkar, Juggernaut co-founder and former Penguin Random House India editor-in-chief, spoke to Mashable about the new app.

"The first premise is, if we bring the world of books into the same space as your phone, will you be more likely to read. What if the price and length became much more accessible?" – Chiki Sarkar

The e-books have been adapted for reading on smartphones, with a focus on short reads and serialized stories. This means that most commissioned books are fewer than 25,000 words in length. The reading design is clean, classic and easy on the eye. There is an emphasis on genres that are the most popular and commercially-successful in India, such as romance, sex, crime, self-help and fantasy, non-fiction, and books for young adults and teens.

While Juggernaut's most obvious parallel is with Amazon, the founders say they're much closer in spirit to Netflix. Co-founder Durga Raghunath says they looked at Netflix's easy user experience, exciting mix of partners and original content, and the way they've matched their users to genres "in a genius way." Like Netflix, its app intuitively suggests books for readers based on their past preferences and will eventually have time-bound subscriptions.
Source- article.wn