Did you ever notice that there are certain books you bring out your highlighter for? Passages jump out at you screaming, "Remember me. I can make your life better if you do." It gets marked because something resonates with you and you want to be able to revisit it quick and easily.
Now we have entered the digital age full force. Unless there is more coming that I am not aware of. Being an intuitive, perhaps I shall see something ahead of time. In the meantime, there is an exciting new website that connects authors and readers on one platform.
Leefing allows readers to take extract (leefs) of their favourite parts from books and share with friends through social media. Leefs are a great way for readers to discover new books and for authors to connect with a wider audience.
This is so neat. I tested it out and after you take a leef, you can choose to share it via Google +, Facebook, Twitter or Email. Here is a look at the pop up window.
I uploaded my book and then took a leef from it and shared it. In the upper right corner you will see my picture and my name. If someone else took a leef from my book, it would show their avatar and name.
Okay, back to being an intuitive. The night I uploaded my book to leefing.com (which is free to do and I priced the book free as well) I had this dream of looking at James Van Praagh's book "Talking To Heaven". I wanted to leef it and I think my wish was coming true or was on the way to becoming true . It seemed to me that leefing became a very popular thing to do. Authors were jumping on the bandwagon.
The back ground story to leefing.com in the words of the developer:
The journey of leefing.com begun one Sunday afternoon when I was forced to cancel my plans for the day due to our good old British weather. I decided to try my hands at writing after putting it off for many years and since I had no where to go I thought what harm can it bring. Along the way as I kept writing mostly on weekends, it hit me that - 'how was I going to get my book out once I was done -being a totally unknown?'
Also:
- He was shocked to see that Indie authors were forced to sell their books for nothing. This led to the decision to make the platform free to publish and not to request any commissions from sales of books.
- The idea for leefs came about when I realized the amount of highlights I had made with colour marker in books I had read in the past.
- What if I could digitally grab and store bits that I loved from an eBook and I could revisit the page at anytime in future?
Now back to my personal experience with uploading my book...please do this one thing if you are an author and are going to take up leefing. Follow the directions! They are simple and easy to follow. Use the Notepad. If I could highlight that word for you to see here better I would. Use the Notepad. And one more time...use the Notepad. Your font will stay as you want it too.
At first I just saved my word document to a text file but it went wonky on me. Once I changed to copying and pasting my book into the Notepad, the font stayed the same. Then I was able to bold or italicize the writing after. You name your chapter and upload one chapter at a time. Then you can review before publishing.
Authors...this is a call out to you - it is time to take up leefingl. You can name the price of your book and get paid directly to your PayPal account.
Readers...this is a call out to you too! You will be able to let your favorite authors know which passages from their books speak to you and you can share it with your friends and family.
Oh yes...by all means check out my book, Dream The Answer Challenge 2009 on the website. I plan to upload my other books as well, using the Notepad of course.
And of course…you can find the link to my book here on Authorsden. Click on website link below for more information about leefing.
The leefing website has you set the price of your book and you earn the entire amount. No commissions taken.
Also, from what I understand, viruses can't be passed through the Notepad so that is another reason it is recommended to it.
I do agree with the review that Ronald posted in that authors are resisting learning things for themselves and it is a detriment.
Seann
Text is used as the primary driver of the Internet in hypertext format (http), but it does not carry any formatting so all of that nice formatting like font and other modifications are lost when you try to paste or send it. On the other hand, Notepad and other text editors use Rich Text Format (MS Word 4?) that allow enough format to go through so that your document looks the same as it did when you created it.
Unfortunately, Microsoft has up sold Microsoft Word so many times that it is now so complicated and so full of formatting that if you try to paste it into the Internet in many places you will only get garbage. The solution to that is simple. In Microsoft Word or other word processor (if there is any other after the Microsoft monopoly) just re-save the document in Rich Text Format (.rtf) under the Save As button or pull down menu. This is pretty basic computer stuff, but I find that so many authors have resisted learning how to use their computers to their detriment when it comes to the Internet and end up having to rely on social media like Facebook and Twitter and simple relay websites like leefing.com and YouTube.com just to share their work.
Ron