Postepic wants to liberate all those interesting text snippets you have languishing on your camera roll and turn them into visually appealing quotations ready..
It’s fair to say the smartphone camera has become the digital tool of most use, rendering the average person’s camera roll essentially a memory buffer where carefully composed photographs rub up against snaps of receipts, funny stuff you saw on the street and fancied sharing with friends, and, sometimes, snippets of text you came across in a (paper) book and wanted to make a note of. Snapping a photo in that moment is a stand in for the lack of real-world copy and paste.
And it’s the latter kind of photo (text quotations) that the founders of smartphone app Postepic want to liberate from this unstructured jumble of visual data. Indeed, the first version of the app, released last year as a bootstrapping side-project by a bunch of book-loving friends after they graduated from university in Poland, was just a basic way for them to organize and share photos of the quotations they had cluttering their camera rolls.
“We started this project as we wanted to build something together,” says co-founder Łukasz Konofalski. “We all share a passion for books and were used to sharing quotes and books recommendations between each other. We came across some reports that showed that in Poland in 2016 only half a book will be read on average, so we also wanted to support readership in general by building a bridge between traditional books and mobile world.
“Two things really surprised us when we finally launched it in June 2016: the number of new books worth reading we discovered by simply sharing quotes with each other; and a very warm reception we received from the developers and users communities alike. We have received volumes of valuable feedback from them — and got back to work.”
Version 2 of the app , which launched this week, turns a basic idea into an app that has enough form and function to feel appealing to use. The core additional feature is optical character recognition (OCR) — meaning that instead of uploading and sharing ugly-looking (and hard to read) chunks of raw page text, i.e. in their original photo form, Postepic users can now lift the words off the page, capturing and editing the text and its visual presentation by choosing from a selection of fonts and backgrounds.
The final result presents the text snippet inside a square frame, in a way that’s both easy to read and visibly pleasing (for an example of how utilitarian quotes looked in v1 of the app see the image at the bottom of this post). So Postepic basically lets people turn a favorite quote into an easily shareable unit of digital social currency. Aka, an ‘Instagram for book quotes’.
Last year Facebook added a feature aimed at enhancing the impact of the text statuses being shared via its platform, giving users the ability to add colored backgrounds to their text updates to make them more visual. And with so much visual noise being injected into messaging and communications apps, this is hardly surprising.
