SuperRead: An enhanced reading experience

Transforming reading into a cheap, effortless, efficient, and accessible experience, specially designed to boost readers among Gen Z.

As a young student, I understand the value of reading in our daily lives, but at the same time, I can see the decline in reading habits among my generation. Recent research has shown that young people, particularly members of Generation Z, are becoming less interested in reading. Data from numerous studies conducted by reputable organizations provide evidence for this issue.

According to a study from San Diego State University, fewer 17-year-olds (56%) reported reading a book, magazine, or newspaper every day in 2016 than they did in 1979 (72%). The study, which examined information from the US Census Bureau and the National Center for Education Statistics, discovered that the decline in reading engagement is widespread and affects people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds as well as all geographic regions. This data, especially when compared to earlier generations, shows that there is a problem with young people's reading engagement.

The American Psychological Association (APA) did another study that corroborates this issue. According to the APA study, which examined data from the National Survey of Children's Health, fewer kids aged 6 to 17 reported reading books for enjoyment every day in 2017 than in 2016, falling from 31% to 27%. The study also discovered that from 9% in 2016 to 13% in 2017, more children reported never reading books for enjoyment. According to these statistics, the issue is only getting worse with time, especially reading because of pleasure.

My generation's lack of reading habits has a negative impact on our capacity to learn new languages, as well as our mental well-being because reading is crucial for cognitive growth as it increases vocabulary, language proficiency, and focus. A greater sense of empathy, better mental health, and better academic performance are also proven benefits of reading for pleasure.

It is obvious that there are multiple contributing factors to the issue; therefore, a holistic approach to solving it is necessary. Many of these contributing factors are:

1. Lack of focus and time when reading long texts: This is mainly due to the dominance of social media applications such as TikTok, and their quick-format videos. Books on the other hand are long and slow-consuming content, making them not attractive to the younger audience because it consumes a lot of time and requires effort to focus.

2. Lack of interest in the traditional physical format: Reading books in PDF or EPUB format is an increasing tendency among the younger audience, making reading more convenient and accessible anywhere as it doesn’t require physical space or perfect lighting conditions.

3. Lack of money to sustain a reading habit: Reading is expensive, and Generation Z does not have a high disposable income that they can use to keep the habit of reading.

SuperRead makes reading a cheap, effortless, efficient, and accessible experience. 

By using a text-to-speech AI we are able to emulate the voice that is played inside our heads when reading. This increases the focus of readers, as they need to follow the voice in order to not miss anything, and therefore unconsciously the distracting thoughts are suppressed. Furthermore, it gives you an estimation in minutes of how long is going to take you to read certain books or chapters, and also it allows the possibility of increasing the speed.

This last feature, combined with the enhanced version of the one-word-at-a-time system, allows you to just look at one point in the screen, hit play and you will be automatically reading. This system displays the word being said in the middle of the screen, where one letter is always highlighted and remains in the same position on the screen. With the audio and this display system, it is very easy to dedicate little effort to the task of reading but keep the maximum efficiency and understanding of the text.

Different modes and customizations will also be available, such as the standard guided highlighting reading which highlights the word being said from the text. Some other customization may be the color of the text, position, size, and many other customizable settings.

However, all these formats of reading texts would be useless if we don’t offer books to read. SuperRead will offer a selection of books for a monthly subscription, which will be available in the different formats we offer.

By paying a monthly subscription for an affordable price, you could have access to most of the knowledge and adventures in the world, and be able to read anytime, anywhere without dedicating much time or effort.

The solution presented will directly impact Generation Z, but also improve the reading capabilities of people with disorders such as dyslexia or ADHD, who may have difficulty reading or focusing, or readers among other generations that want to improve their reading experience.

The main group that we serve, Generation Z, spends most of their time on social media and consuming digital leisure. Social media platforms are known to be very polarizing and to make their users become more and more addicted to their format thanks to instant gratification and short-form content that just sends stimuli to the brain of the user. This makes this population the one with more focus and attention problems, as well as polarized ideas and not developed critical thinking. But social media, video games, or digital leisure are not responsible for this damage, instead, the major problem is that these sites have monopolized youth’s time, thus provoking a decline among readers which at the same time provoked the previously described issues.

Therefore, the impact of SuperRead would be tremendously beneficial for this generation. There is a high number of people interested in reading but may not have the economical capability to pay for every book they want to read. This means that the creation of an application that they can download and just pay an affordable monthly subscription that would allow them access to thousands of books already has a huge impact, as the price of this subscription may be cheaper than even one book. But also, some people that are already predisposed to reading may face serious focus or time issues, and since we offer a solution to that, by making reading a more enjoyable and efficient task, we are already removing the possible barriers that make them not read. 

The rise of readers among this generation will provide a new way of leisure but also provide the future generation of leaders, thinkers, and workers with more global and historic perspectives and consciences.

And for those with some disabilities, SuperRead supposes a huge change as they are now able to read and overcome those disorders to be able to compete without any disadvantage in today’s society.

I started this project alone, with a few years of experience in web development, and having myself the lack of focus that is widespread among gen Z. A few months ago, I started a journey to design a solution for this problem and I ended up creating the first mockups of SuperRead. Thanks to my recent years working as a web developer freelancer, I am able to start the development of the application and build a working demo, so the technical side is covered. Even though I am able to create the product, I have recently expanded my knowledge on the marketing side of things, as the way we present this project to its potential users is essential, and I am currently developing the marketing strategy and the approach I will be taking with this project. Also, there is an important legal side of the project that I need to take care of as well regarding the copyright of the books, and I did my research on this as well. Even though I researched this, with enough resources I will be able to hire people that can help me in these 3 aspects in order to present a perfect solution with an excellent plan. I am also open to finding a cofounder if we can distribute the workload of this project between the two.

Regarding me, the reason why I started to develop this project is that I usually experiment the lack of focus that I mentioned earlier, and once I needed to read a book for a high school test, but I tried to read and I wasn’t able to focus or read more than 3 lines without thinking on other thing or needing to reread the paragraph. It was a hard time and I lost a lot of time there. Then, for the next test, I decided to read and listen to an audiobook at the same time, and surprisingly, it increased my focus but also it allowed me to increase my reading speed by a lot. Thanks to this positive experience I decided to create a solution for the rest of the people that might be suffering the same issues as me. Since I am also a representation of the people I intend to serve, it was easy for me to develop a solution adjusted to our needs, and in order to validate the idea, I presented it to my friends in highschool and they really liked it. That’s how with trial and error in the mockups, I was able to propose the best system that would serve Gen Z.

Since this generation is used to social media, one of the main steps I took was to analyze the type of content they consume, and determine how we could approach this public with our idea. One thing I found during research is that a specific type of TikTok video is very popular, and at the same time, it may be the gate to our software. I am talking about the videos where a voice reads a text and subtitles display what is being said. The content of these videos is usually stories posted on other social media such as Reddit. Even though these videos may be one of the longest formats on the platform, with durations of around 2-3 minutes, it has a surprisingly high retention and engagement ratio. This was an affirmative fact since it proves that people are already used to a similar form of content as SuperRead, and they like it and can focus on it while the story goes on.

The second step I took in research, was to talk with my potential public, and since I am from Generation Z, so are most of my friends. I talked with them and explained the idea, and some of them gave me valuable feedback that allowed me to create the current version of the idea. Others are experienced readers and they agreed with the idea at the same time they confessed to me they still prefer physical books. This made me think a lot because I realized that the content of the books matters as well. The people that liked reading physical books mostly have been doing so for almost all of their lives and now it is difficult to make them change to the new system and they mostly read fiction content. Whereas the people that read non-fiction and self-aid books told me that they would change to the new system if that would save them time. This shows that the main public I should target at first among Gen Z should be readers of this type of book as well as non-readers because they would adapt better and extract the most efficiency from this system.

These interesting conclusions match my personal experience, and what I also was able to research on the internet.

SuperRead is a complete revolution on how reading works. In the same way, technology unleashed a new potential on how movies were displayed, SuperRead does the same with books. The limit of the physical medium is left behind to expand into the unlimited possibilities of the digital one. 

Also, the number of people that will be able to learn and experiment with new emotions with just one click will increase exponentially. This will have a huge impact on the generation that will be the future leaders, entrepreneurs, teachers, workers, and the ones that will inherit the earth in the following years, as critical thinking will expand, and the ability to learn from the errors of the past will be unlocked again, but this time, in a catalytic way, transforming a whole generation. Learning from what other people wrote is one of the best ways to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again, and reading is the only way to assimilate this ancestral knowledge. 

Not only knowledge is contained in texts, but also great stories that transmit emotions. The impact of this technology is such, that it can even wake up a new type of literature, adapted to this new form of enjoyment, maybe with short stories just like TikTok, but in our platform. Think of this as the new literary vanguard of the 21st century.

Thousands of books, with thousands of interesting stories and lessons to be discovered just with a click, in an effortless way and without consuming much time.

The main impact that SuperRead can make in society, is the awakening of the critical spirit, boosted by the knowledge of the past, in the new generations. Literacy rates will increase, interest in literature will begin to rise again and an increase in the world's number of readers is expected. 

If we look at one year from now, we will have already set a customer base that will allow us to generate enough money to expand this app from English to other languages, expand in less developed countries and help those who are willing to learn by themselves thanks to books. With this expansion that would start a year from now, millions of people will recover their will to read and learn. Individuals with the capacity of self-teaching and elaborating critical thinking will rise, and the cognitive abilities among Gen Z will rise again, hopefully making social media at least a little bit less hegemonic in youth's time.

The how is simple, because the system we have designed is already oriented to Gen Z, and they are already in social media, we just need to reach them in their own 'realms'. Starting on TikTok, the reach is huge. We just need to target at first communities already interested in reading, and then little by little expand the scope to greater audiences among Gen Z. The greater expansions would take place in places where there is not any hegemonic digital reading service yet, and therefore we have the opportunity to establish as the hegemonic one in a lot of countries, where not only Gen Z would be our target. The potential for growth is immense, and the potential for change in our customer's life is greater.

The technology used in this solution is the following:

• AI Neural generative text-to-speech service (At first amazon's Polly service will be used, later we can migrate to Azure's TTS)
• Custom AI Neural generative TTS. In a future, if we have enough resources, we can develop our own TTS system, so we can emulate more realistically a narrator's voice.
• Web frontend to develop both the browser extension and book reading application with typescript and different frameworks such as NextJS
• AWS or Heroku and MongoDB to store information on books, accounts, payments, and so on.
• AI to analyze books and process them into SuperRead format. (For the future)
• A mobile framework like React Native or Flutter to develop the mobile application.

These technologies will be used to create the SuperRead software and scale it in the future.

We currently don't serve anyone yet as we are still under development. However, we plan to serve a major part of the digital generation Z. Only in the united states, this makes up to 70 million people. Taking into consideration that mostly all of them have access to digital mediums and have the ability to read, our software could expand easily there. Of course, not 100% of generation Z is interested in reading, but thanks to our global ambitions the number could easily surpass that amount of people from Generation Z in the US, but with a global public and slowly grow in other countries than Europe or North America, and potentially expand into Asia, Africa, and South America as well. There are a lot of potential people willing to use our product because Generation Z is more connected than ever and the SuperRead effect can spread quickly.

There are a few barriers that may stop us from achieving our objectives:

• The legal barrier when obtaining the rights of the books we want to use in our selection
• The financial barrier when obtaining those rights.
• The financial barrier when scaling with more ambitious campaigns to unleash the true potential of this software over Generation Z as a whole
• The cultural barrier may make global expansion a little bit slow as we need to introduce new languages and local authors in every country.

SuperRead is a software that will allow not only Gen Z but many other people to improve their reading experience and make it more accessible and affordable. At first, we will be offering just a browser extension and possibly an app to read any text in SuperRead format. We will allow people to use it for free for a number of days because feedback first will be one of the most important interests. After that trial phase is over, if they want to continue using the system, they will need to pay a subscription. Therefore, we will be using the subscription business model that will grant us financial stability and a steady income that we can use to grow further and reach more people. 

The customers will be obtained at first from TikTok, and later expand to other social media or marketing methods. The target customer at the beginning will be anyone from Gen Z who already reads or has an interest in reading. One idea for the ads could be a video emulating how our software works published on TikTok that reads the beginning of famous sagas or books for a couple of minutes, and if they stay until the end we present our software during the last seconds. This is just an example.

The cost is scalable, the maintenance cost scales as the platform is being used, and the marketing scales as more people come in. The only cost that is difficult to measure is the rights of the books we will include in our selection. Maybe we could pay the publishers the normal royalties they would get from every book sold, but every time a book is finished.

The revenue will mostly come from subscriptions, but we can also have a B2B model with blogging or article sites. Pricing must be affordable, with a free 7-day trial or any other way to let users test our product first, and then different plans so it can adapt to anyone's needs. We can also sell individual access to a specific book for less than what the book would cost physically and it would be attached to their account.

In order to develop the project three steps need to be taken:

1. Develop the technology
2. Market the product
3. Acquire the copyright of a selection of books

The first step doesn't require a big budget, as I am the main developer and it just consumes time. The second step might require a budget to get bigger and grow, but to launch at the first level a small budget might be enough. However, for the third step, a higher budget might be needed in order to be able to offer a selection of books.

Therefore, the sustainability plan is the following:

1. Develop the technology and release it as a browser extension to read websites or PDFs with our method.
2. Market this extension on social media to a small number of people for free or using low-budget, just to get enough people to validate the idea, get feedback and start getting money to reinvest. For a limited period of time, we can offer the extension for free like a 7-day trial and then charge a subscription to use it.
3. With the money collected from this first subscription, we can grow marketing-wise and expand the user base so we can get enough money to offer our very own selection of books, develop the software needed in order to make it a smooth experience, and market the new system with new subscription plans.
4. Then, the new money will be used to expand the client base, expand the library and improve the technology used.