I’m finding it pretty hard to understand why people are still churning out clearly sub-par reader apps for the iPhone, and harder to believe that they’re seeing any sort of profit from these programs. Wattpad brings one innovation to the mix, but its humdrum presentation and centralized online library prevent it from being close to a contender for the go-to reader app.
Wattpad’s innovation is the ability to share. You can tag books you like which will in turn recommend it to readers with similar tags and libraries as you.
Some of Wattpad's suggestions are unhelpful at best and obviously done by title words.
There are also other sharing options such as emailing recommendations through the app, but Wattpad can hardly be granted credit for letting readers emails someone about a book. The recommendation system seems to work a lot like those of Netflix and Pandora, clearly controlled by an algorithm of some sort and therefore every interesting recommendation that shows up bring with it four duds. It’s also obvious that the back up plan for this is to send similar titles, as my recommendations based on the pre-populated Curious Case of Benjamin Button suggest. It’s certainly nice to see someone trying innovation out though, and it’s a commendable move to try book-sharing integration into readers.
Books are all free which is nice, and you can upload your own documents (from ebooks to fanfics) to Wattpad’s website. The downside to this sharing system is that texts don’t download to your iPhone, rather your library is merely a collection of bookmarks to the Wattpad database. Therefore how long your books actually remain available cannot be certain (Twilight was at the top of the What’s New list, and I imagine it’ll be gone the second Little, Brown and Company’s lawyers find out). This also means no service, no reading. So Wattpad’s probably pretty useless on an airplane.
Requiring service to access a book is sucky.
The presentation is where Wattpad really sucks. The texts aren’t cleaned up very well, and so often the screen is filled with messy formatting. Font, text size, color and background color are all customizable. Landscape reading is available with a twist of the accelerometer. Rather than turning pages, books are presented is a single scrolling page which can be set to scroll automatically if you’re too lazy to swipe your thumb (page up and down buttons are available so simulate page turns). There is no bookmarking capability, but Wattpad seems to remember your place in multiple books. There is also a rather unhelpful (because it changes with text size) page number listed in the top corner of the screen.
There's so much crap on the screen that won't go away.
And oh, is the screen real estate is poorly utilized. The header bar, menu bar, useless scroll speed bar and more useless vertical position-in-the-book map take up a solid chunk of the small screen. They go away if you tap the center, but come back 2 seconds later for no good reason. I couldn’t find a way to get them to stay away. When navigating the menus, ugly popup ads clutter things, which is especially annoying since utilizing the full capability of this app requires you to visit their website and presumably see plenty of ad exposure in the process.
So while Wattpad brings a few good ideas to the table, its poor execution makes for an unpleasant reading experience. Reading is an inherently peaceful experience, and any reader app that can’t capture a sense of the comfortable is a failure. Clutter and disorganization don’t make for a comfortable read.