Can anyone give me the pros and cons of the Reading App versus Bloom? What I see is that now both can deal with audio (recording seams easier in Bloom), Bloom has lots of pictures available, and other helps to make your books. Reading App is easier to publish and to share, at least at the moment (no need for a computer to get books from the internet). Bloom hopes to improve on that.
Users of the app in my case: in the village (no or low internet, many speakers together, no computer), and all over the world. Writers of the texts, and voices: in town, access to a computer. Compiler of Reading App: me from a distance.
Hi Bep,
Great question. The good news is, you don’t have to choose. Reading App Builder has a Bloom Player built in.
Here’s how to think about it. Bloom is a way to make and publish books. Bloom’s publishing targets are:
- Paper
- ePUB
-
BloomLibrary.org
- From there, to your own website
- Bloom Reader App (like Kindle)
- BloomPub Viewer (desktop)
- Reading App Builder (Publish as a bloomd / bloompub, then choose that in RAB)
- Video/Facebook (near future)
So, even if we ignore all the other benefits of Bloom and focus just on this publishing issue alone, it makes sense to produce books in Bloom and then, if you want a stand-alone app, create one with Reading App Builder.
–John
3 Likes
I agree with John.
I will just add, RAB has multiple source types it supports: SFM, DOCX, HTML, ePub, text and Bloomd.
My understanding (which may be wrong) is Bloom cannot import any other source forms. You have to create a Bloom source from scratch or from a template.
RAB can output Apps, ePub and HTML pages.
Bloom’s outputs are covered well by John in his post.