Nowadays, people, especially teenagers tend to be a fan of social networking sites such as facebook and twitter…
But it is no just social networking…There are also sites for reading unlimited stories — Wattpad…
Wattpad is an online community themed around writing and story-telling. Users are able to post articles, stories, and poems about anything either online or through the Wattpad app. The content includes work by undiscovered and published writers. Users are able to comment and like stories or join groups associated with the website. Around five in ten users are U.S. based; traffic also comes from the U.K., Canada, the Philippines, Australia, and more.
Wattpad originated in 2006,as a result of a collaboration between Allen Yau and Ivan Yuen…In February 2007, Wattpad announced the addition of over 17,000 eBooks from Project Gutenberg making them available to mobile users.According to a June 2009 Wattpad press release, the mobile application had been downloaded over 5 million times.In March 2009, an iPhone version was released. This was followed by the launch on BlackBerry App World in April 2009, Google Android in June 2009 and Apple iPad in April 2010.
The most frequently voted stories (every day) appear on the “What’s Hot List”. These stats change daily, due to reads and votes by other users. According to the profiles visible on the site, many of these authors are teenagers. Wattpad’s users mainly consist of women who massively outnumber the few men users.
Wattpad also has a Featured Story list, which promotes content reviewed and approved by staff and an editorial review board. Many of these featured stories are written by self-published and professional writers from different genres.
There are stories that are published because of Wattpad — wherein the authors became popular because of this site… Some of these published stories are ‘Diary ng Panget books 1-4’ by HaveYouSeenThisGirl(Denny) which ranked number 1 bestseller for Philippine Publication and soon will be a movie adaptation , ’Voiceless 1 and 2’ by HaveYouSeenThisGirl , ‘SheDied’ by HaveYouSeenThisGirl , ‘Talk Back and You’re Dead’ by Alesana Marie and also soon will be a movie adaptation , ‘My Prince’ by Alyloony(Aly Almario) , Private vs. Public by hannalove(Hanna Gregorio) , A Kiss In The Rain by JC Quin , Sadist Lover by Aril Daine , and many more…
As these stories are published,there are more stories being published…..Many people tend to buy these stories,maybe to compare the “wattpad version” to the “book version” , collection, to fulfill their “ambitions” , to get ideas of writing their OWN stories, and more…..
Also,wattpad stories are a trend to teens , even adults because not just they have these “mushy lines” but also to the lesson we can learn………
Some of the large volume of user-uploaded material hosted on Wattpad is copyrighted material created by authors who did not grant republication rights. In May 2009, an article in the New York Times noted, “Sites like Scribd and Wattpad, which invite users to upload documents like college theses and self-published novels, have been the target of industry grumbling in recent weeks, as illegal reproductions of popular titles have turned up on them”.Calling Wattpad a site that “furnishes iPhone with bootleg books,” Bill Ray of The Register says the company “hides behind safe-harbour rules, promising to remove content as soon as notified by the owners”.
The Wattpad website notes, “We do not welcome upload of material that violate its copyright terms,” but also states “it is simply not possible to screen and verify all posted content.”In response to industry criticism, in April 2009 (before the publication of the New York Times article that named Wattpad as a vehicle for user-generated ebook piracy) Wattpad announced an “Authors In Charge” program, designed to allow authors or their representatives to identify and directly remove infringing content from the site,but this program is designed specifically for “authors with published books for sale.”
