On June 16 last year, 3ook.com officially launched—in other words, this third-generation e-bookstore built around “read, listen, own” just celebrated its first anniversary.
To mark the occasion, the team has lined up a series of activities, and leading the charge is the library, which quietly went into service on June 16. Everything in its collection is available to borrow—no waiting lists, ever—and it’s both readable and listenable. The library is currently in trial operation, offering for now over six hundred curated titles from Hong Kong and Taiwan, with more publishers and authors joining all the time. If you’d like to lend out your own work through 3ook.com and earn a share of the revenue, do contact us at [email protected].
I’ll say more later about the thinking and the features behind the new library. For this issue, let’s first look back on a few of 3ook.com’s milestones from its first year, in reverse chronological order.
The Mobile App
If we’re counting the requests users brought to the team most often, the mobile app is without doubt number one. Even though I—the person in charge of the product—am the kind of oddball who avoids phone apps whenever possible and uses a computer far more than a phone, I take user feedback very seriously. The truth is, 3ook.com’s mobile app had been in the works for a long time; it just took a while to build, and Apple’s review process was painfully drawn out, rejecting us a dozen times, which is why it couldn’t launch until mid-March this year. Apologies for the long wait.
After the 3ook.com app launched, we updated it no fewer than ten times—iterating fast while ironing out all sorts of small bugs, especially uninterrupted read-aloud in standby mode without draining the battery. Three months on, I can tell you with real confidence that the reading experience on the iPhone version is now smooth.
As for Android, in most cases it performs on par with the iPhone, but there are simply so many brands and models that I won’t make any grand promises. If your Android model is on the more obscure side and you run into glitches, please do let us know, and we’ll do our best to fix it. Oh, and 3ook.com also supports iPad, and even macOS—fellow Apple fans, give it a try.
The one shortcoming is that while the app offers a superior reading experience, readers can only buy books on the 3ook.com website. Plenty of users have been puzzled by this and have asked to buy books directly in the app, but because selling books through Apple or Google means giving up thirty percent of the revenue—far more than the gross margin on a book—there’s nothing we can do. This is a problem shared by every e-book app, and until the two big platforms loosen their policies, it has no solution.
Fun fact: Our mobile app is simply called 3ook.com on Android, but on iPhone it’s called 3ook Reader. The reason is that Apple wouldn’t approve it otherwise—and this was one of the many times the iPhone app got rejected before it could go live.
Celebrity Narrators, Personal Narrators
No longer making a fuss over the distinction between text books and audiobooks—giving every book a voice—is one of 3ook.com’s defining features.
To respect people as living, organic beings while achieving the above at a workable cost, we work with voice talents: we record a short passage of text, then have AI analyze the voiceprint and read out the entire book in their voice. Over the past year, four narrators have generously lent their voices—Pazu and Phoebe, the team’s one and only extrovert, reading in Cantonese; Astro of Blocktrend and Aurora, the team’s Taiwan lead, reading in Mandarin. Any book on 3ook.com can be read to you by these four narrators, as long as the copyright holder hasn’t opted out.
Sharp-eyed readers will realize that by partnering with more authors and YouTubers, 3ook.com can offer more and more narrators. Indeed—you’ve seen right through it—and celebrity narrators are precisely one of the anniversary activities. As for who exactly, allow me to keep you in suspense so the rest of the team doesn’t silence me; keep an eye on 3ookReview or Threads for the announcement.
Beyond having celebrities and authors read aloud, many readers also wish for a parent to read to a child, or a partner to read to their loved one. For that, we’ve added “Personal Narrators”: just provide a recording, and 3ook.com can analyze the voiceprint and generate a personal narrator—using the most cutting-edge technology to meet the most primal of needs, connecting people to one another.
Fun fact: Unlike the four narrators who serve all readers, this feature is a one-to-one service, and the AI compute cost is very high. As the bad guy on the team, I actually opposed offering Personal Narrators to Plus members and argued for charging separately for it. But my voice carries little weight, and the bosses overruled me.
The Independent Publishing Book Fair
Last July, under the theme “Reading Everywhere,” Hong Kong’s independent publishing book fair was held at Hunter Bookstore. We’re grateful to the many independent publishers who threw their support behind us by listing their works on 3ook.com, and grateful to the organizers for their generosity in letting this newly launched e-bookstore take part—giving us our first chance to meet readers in the physical world, introduce the product’s philosophy and features, and hear readers’ invaluable feedback.
According to a little birdie (don’t tell anyone I’m the leak~), 3ook.com may also turn up at a certain book fair this year, where team members will once again meet readers and authors in person—and there might even be the final event of the anniversary series during it. Readers who, like me, treasure the chance to connect face to face, don’t miss this once-in-a-year opportunity.
Fun fact: Phoebe, who ran our booth last year, “made her debut” at the fair and earned plenty of praise—which is how she became 3ook.com’s first real-life narrator, with a status practically like that of an anchor. Before Phoebe and the other three narrators generously offered their voices, we could only use nameless, system-generated voices, and I have to admit, it felt worlds apart.
Beyond the above, last year also saw two workshops worth noting in Hualien and Tainan, the launch of local histories from both Taiwan and Hong Kong, the gradual listing of titles from Taiwanese publishers, our first IBO, and more.
Before I put down my pen, more important than listing every event is to once again thank everyone who supported us during this past year—back when 3ook.com was, quite literally, still learning to babble its first words: the publishers, bookstores, authors, engineers, narrators, influencers, and so on. And last but most important of all, our readers—without you, books are just heaps of words, and 3ook.com is just rows upon rows of code.
p.s. My mother, Wong Kwai-lan, passed away on Sunday at the age of 93. Still adjusting to life without that tie that bound us, more than once these past few days I’ve instinctively almost walked into her room to greet her as usual, only to come to my senses and remember—ah, she’s no longer here. What changes lie ahead for me, I can’t yet say; maybe I’ll read and make more books, or maybe I’ll just lie flat and catch up on sleep. But one thing is already certain. In my younger years I’d long held the thought that once my parents were gone, I’d have no reason to stay in Hong Kong—not that I dislike Hong Kong so much, just that the world is vast, and as a citizen of the Earth I had no reason not to go off and roam. In 2019, that reason appeared. And now that my parents have departed this world, I find I no longer want to leave this land at all. I suppose I, too, am a slave to freedom.
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