On Saturday, Tokyo-based tech start-up SpinningWorks introduced the alpha version of the iPad viewer app for clipping your favorite parts of e-books and sharing them with the others, which is called Qlippy.
Qlippy is a combination of a website and the iPad app, and allows you to import EPUB-formatted content via iTunes and to share the text you’ve clipped with other users over the Internet. EPUB is a free and open e-book standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum(IDPF).
The website does not have e-book content itself but have titles, author names, parameters of the clipped content and the reader’s comments on it. The company expects to add features for connecting to social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook, and to introduce a public API for encouraging the third party app development.
SpinningWorks is intended to target foreign markets prior to that of Japan, almost a half of downloading requests for the app has come from the US in the last two days since the app release, they say. They also expect to tie up with EPUB-formatted content distributors and to engage tens of thousand users by the end of this year.
Masaru IKEDA