Taking a chance…

January 23, 2012 Smashwords

Well, this blog is normally not the first with breaking news, but right now it is on the frontline of a test.

Testing what, you ask? Well, go to the Fire Season page (on the menu above) and you’ll see a new “Read Sample” button. It’s a prototype of an embedded reader for Smashwords samples, and making its first (temporary) appearance away from the test server.

If there’s any takeup for it and no critical bugs, there is a Java app in the works which has more options, and which this version will eventually become the fallback for. Meanwhile here’s v0.3 on temporary display. Since this blog is more likely to attract readers and authors than the coders’ blogs, it’s up here to gain a bit of feedback and some extra opinions.

For background, this is all part of the Smashwords Tools project which has been taking up a lot of my writing time. You might have seen a few of the small blue widgets we’ve been building, used on this blog and elsewhere. A few technically-minded Smashwords authors got together to make some widgets to help promote the ebooks.

There are more details over at the project’s blog, here.