Social Media

Wattpad announced a massive $46 million third round of financing this morning, saying it would use the cash to expand its team and boost product development.

The social reading platform already has 25 million users who spend six billion minutes a month on the platform, the company said, which means Wattpad has doubled in size over the past year. All content on the system is contributed for free by writers looking to build their audience.

For you, I, and probably many others, LinkedIn is a bit of an odd beast. We all no doubt have a profile on the 'social network for professionals', but how often we actually log in and check what's going on is another matter altogether.

Founded in 2003, LinkedIn garnered somewhere in the region of $1.5 billion in revenue last year. Today, it claims 277 million members, 3.5 million active company profiles, 24,000 schools, and 300,000 jobs. Its core mission is to "...connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful".

We had fun checking social media demographics surveys from different credible sources like Pew Research Center and Burst Media and we were able to pluck out some distinct patterns that suggest women are taking over social media and we've turned the data into a nice infographic.

The infographic shows that women not only use social media more often than men, but they use these sites in more ways.  More women also use the top social media sites and they dominate the visual-type social websites, which are the fastest growing social networks today.

We're thrilled to announce that Scribd now offers readers over 300,000 book titles through our subscription service! That's right - your personal digital library has now expanded to include 300k+ New York Times bestsellers, literary classics, groundbreaking non-fiction, and more. And with big numbers comes a lot of big, interesting data. So, we designed an infographic to highlight some fun facts about Scribd subscribers and their reading habits.

It would run to over a million pages, featuring more than four million articles by 20 million volunteers: an "record-breaking" new project to turn Wikipedia into 1,000 books has just launched on Indiegogo. Conceived by the team who work on the open source book tool for Wikipedia at publisher PediaPress, the Indiegogo fundraiser is looking to raise $50,000 (£30,000) to bring Wikipedia into print. "We all know that Wikipedia is huge. The English version alone consists of more than four million articles. But can you imagine how large Wikipedia really is?

Rob Johnson is the founder and director at Research Consulting Limited and former head of research operations at the University of Nottingham. He will be leading a free webinar Open Access: The Journey So Far with the Copyright Clearance Center reviewing the progress of the OA movement and its future.

Wattpad, an online community where readers can find and discuss a variety of free stories, is announcing updated versions of its iOS and Android apps.

The two biggest changes in the updates, which went live last week, are probably the addition of offline access and inline commenting. Offline reading seems like an obvious feature for a reading app, since you might want to read on an airplane or in the subway. In Wattpad's case that doesn't just mean allowing users to read the stories that they've added to their in-app library

The rise of self-publishing has already catapulted a few lucky writers to the top of bestseller lists. And major publishing houses often try to woo these stars into their fold. Swoon Reads, a new young adult romance publisher, is taking this dance a step further. It has added crowdsourcing to the mix, promising a contract to the writer whose book wins the hearts of a community of online readers.

On Friday - Valentine's Day - Swoon Reads announced the winner of that contract: Sandra Hall a teen librarian in Morristown, N.J.

According to Dan Whaley, founder of Hypothes.is, online comments sections are no longer practical. He believes the solution to creating active and functional online commentary lies in open annotation.

A book trailer is a kind of content that supports a book promotional campaign. It started in the late 90s in the US. Since then, the type of content available on video format has become increasingly diverse. When we speak of book trailer, we are doing so more general terms and include audio-visual productions such as teasers, or video-interviews with the author or the publisher, video summaries, video recommendations from readers or literary industry players, etc..