The future of PubCoder, between new mobile reading and artificial intelligence.

In recent years, our research has focused on the construction of a system that would favor the creation and distribution of digital content of interest to the new generations, who make significant use of smartphones and love to navigate among reels, images, longer or shorter texts and, above all, videos. TikTok has become a new social reference, the consumption of podcasts and audio has increased, and video dominates almost all platforms. At the same time, many ‘traditional’ readings seem less and less attractive to the younger generation.

The authoring tool
Our authoring tool has always been aimed at fostering the construction of new digital book models to allow content providers and creatives to build stories that can use different content formats: text, video, audio, and interaction. Today, almost all Internet users have become accustomed to multimedia surfing because they go through stories told in very different ways:

• One listens to a podcast, which is sometimes also a video.
• One sees slideshows of commented images or stories.
• One reads blogs, posts, and articles.

Sometimes, you put together a jigsaw puzzle on a topic, only sometimes finding all the pieces or fitting them together best. PubCoder 5.0 enables everyone to build finished digital narratives, which we will call books or longforms or with a “new word” (as we did with “posts” and “blogs”); why not use video or audio when possible? Why not provide different ways of reading a story with different depths? Today, all this is possible, and it is also possible to organize it in the best way for users to read.

Distribution
Our Shelf platform enables our customers to create digital libraries to distribute content created with PubCoder (and more) on all mobile and web platforms. Every day, millions of digital objects (books, audiobooks, podcasts, PDFs, videos) are distributed through our custom platforms, worldwide, to readers, students, teachers, and workers on smartphones, tablets, and computers for free, by subscription, with a coupon.

Artificial Intelligence Inside Shelf
The year 2023 saw the explosion of tools using artificial intelligence, provoking debate on many ethical and legal issues; authors question the future of intellectual property, schools the possible use of these tools, and workers the changes that will help or overwhelm them. For months, with our partner Conversa, we have been working on a prototype that uses artificial intelligence to read everything that is put inside a Shelf and thus allow users to query it, with many possible advantages. Imagine going into a digital bookshop and being able to explain, by writing on a chat, what you need or what you are looking for; or being able to get targeted answers on the topics dealt with within that bookshop; and also being able to ask for help to better understand concepts expressed in a book, to have them summarized, translated or to be asked questions to check understanding of a text. This is the direction we have taken, which does not violate rights (the chatbot works in a safe perimeter, and the user is one of your customers who might pay for the service: a chef interrogating your 2000 valuable cookbooks, a student consulting 100 books on the subject of his dissertation); then there is an even more creative vision, where within the system users will be proposed to build new content, even using ‘valuable’ assets, and make it available to everyone with well-defined rules. Many stories and characters have reached the whole world in this way, delegating the localisation of stories, designs, and content to creatives in many countries.

As of February 2024, our authoring+shelf+AI system will go into production, thanks to one of our best international customers working with us on this small revolution; we are sure the future will be one of many intelligent readers.