While the Internet is an all giving place filled with useful information, we still turn to books when we want something solid. There’s something authoritative about a book, a sense of completion. But in our fast and busy lives, we hardly have the time to swift through books. Snippet is a new app that combines the best of traditional authoritative books with the wonders of digital age, and it does it far better than an ebook.
Snippet is a collection of snippets from a book. It’s a minified version of a book, providing you with important details or helping you get started on the right path. Plus, snippets are a lot more dynamic. They have a beautiful design language with high quality images, videos and social media functions baked right in. Sign up with your email address to avail a free Snippet from the app — you can choose any one of six. You can choose from marketing, entrepreneurship, health and food books. I went with Eat Awesome because I love food and well, Paul Jarvis. Once in, you can browse through available snippets and download/buy them.
Snippet is a Universal app and you’ll be able to access all the content on the iPhone and the iPad. However, for a better reading experience, I’s suggest going with the iPad app. Here, each Snippet is broken down into chapters and each chapter is a vertical scrolling page in itself (like Medium for iPhone). There’s a uniformity to snippets. The white background and the san-serif fonts are constant. The use of different colors and images make each snippet stand out. Chapters are usually a page or two (less than 1000 words each) and a snippet can range from 10-30 chapters. You can highlight text and add a note, share it to your social networks right from within the app. If you are up for it, you can get through a snippet in under an hour. Not only are the snippets easy to read, but with a solid infrastructure, they are easy to write as well. The layout is ready to go. All you have to do is fill up the empty places with your text, photos and videos. Snippet will take care of the rest.
Of course, the concept of short books is nothing new, even in the digital world. Kindle tried to do this with their Singles platform, but the complicated proprietary format and ignorance of high quality media made Kindle Singles just as boring as pain old ebooks. Snippet on the other hand is providing an end-to-end solution by making the process of writing a Snippet just as easy as reading one. Snippets are not just ebooks in fancy dressing. They are much more than that. Snippet is available as a Universal App Free on the App Store.