TeleRead talks with Wattpad’s Allen Lau
By Paul Biba
At the IDPF Conference I ran into Allen Lau, the founder of Wattpad, and he had an interesting story.
Allen started in the mobile gaming industry and his current goal is to help indie and small publishers be read on a cell phone. By cell phone Allen does not mean the smartphones some of us use, but the typical Nokia “candy bar” phone, or flip phone, that is commonplace in the third world. It’s Allen’s goal to build the technology to allow these low end phones to read books, and then let the community build the content. He wants to be the YouTube for ebooks.
Why? Well, poverty exists everywhere but even in poor countries low end cell phones are widely available. Smartphones are far out of reach of this community. When Wattpad started there was no iPhone or Android, but cheap Nokias were everywhere.Allen has found that Wattpad has taken off in developing countries, especially Asia, Africa, India, Indonesia and Vietnam. For many in these areas their low end cell phone is their only access to the classics we take for granted. People have written to Allen from climes as far as Nigeria telling him how Wattpad is improving the literacy rate in their country.
With Wattpad’s success, however, some problems have arisen. Since it is community based Wattpad has been experiencing a plethora of copyrighted uploads which, Allen says, he just can’t keep up with in terms of removal. For this reason he started the Authors in Charge program, reported on by TeleRead earlier here, to allow authors to be notified of offending uploads and remove them. So far, Allen says, he has been able to maintain a good relationship with authors and publishers in trying to resolve this problem.
Take a look at Wattpad. There is material available in more than 22 languages. I never thought of the humble cell phone as a force for literacy, but Wattpad is proving that this is an effective way to reach the third world. Hopefully Allen will have an article for us in the near future.
May 17th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Let’s be honest. Wattpad is popular for exactly one reason: people upload Twilight faster than it can be deleted. If they actually were able to stop copyrighted material from being posted (and I doubt they are trying very hard), no one would ever use the app.