Markings for scene changes in chapters

[RejectReality]

I stand corrected on finding it, although the fact that I didn't see it in that traffic jam on the front page introduction when I actively went looking for the link and visited that page doesn't completely invalidate my point.

It not being available on official sites is exactly what I'm talking about on everything else. Trying to download or install it throws up scary potential malware warnings that are going to make many people go, "Nope!"

I downloaded it to look, ignored the scary warning, and then ended up still not installing it because that required changing the default settings on my device to accept unapproved apps, and I decided it wasn't worth the hassle.

Actually, you can download it from the front page of Lit. No need to go to the app store Google Play.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I stand corrected on finding it, although the fact that I didn't see it in that traffic jam on the front page introduction when I actively went looking for the link and visited that page doesn't completely invalidate my point.

It not being available on official sites is exactly what I'm talking about on everything else. Trying to download or install it throws up scary potential malware warnings that are going to make many people go, "Nope!"

I downloaded it to look, ignored the scary warning, and then ended up still not installing it because that required changing the default settings on my device to accept unapproved apps, and I decided it wasn't worth the hassle.

That might be something they should work on. They being Lit.

 

[ChloeTzang]

Why anyone should want to read a book on a tiny screen beats me. No serious reader would want to do so I'm not too worried if what unserious readers see is a total mess. As I see it, it's up to Lit to produce a decent app ....

Now that depends on your reader profiles. Wattpad, for example, makes a big thing of their mobile app coz a huge % of their readers are teenagers who use their mobiles for everything, including reading. So their whole format is geared to that, including recommending 1,500 word chapters coz od the short reader attention span. You'll find a lot of people read books on their iPhone's as well. I don't, coz it kills my eyes, but a lot of people do, especially that younger market, which is probably not a readership LIT is actively promoting itself too. LOL.

If you're aiming to target and reach that younger percentile of readers, mobile apps is where you need to be. Just look around at everyone using apps on their mobiles for everything, including paying for their coffee. I'm not sure where the age cutoff is tho, and I have no idea what LIT's average reader profile is so it's really hard to guess. It's not like they consult with us on their marketing strategy is it

 

[HandsInTheDark]

That might be something they should work on. They being Lit.

Sure, right after they fix it to support the fundamental formatting that's been available since 1978, on mainframes that had less compute power and memory than a cheap phone today. I know it's something of a strain to keep up with open source freeware from about 40 years ago, but maybe someone could give it a shot. </sarcasm>

 

[HandsInTheDark]

A serious reader is, by my definition, someone who wants to read what the author intended. An unserious reader is content with any old crap. If you insist, for whatever reason, on using an app that can only deliver crap...

It's a bit like watching a film that the director designed to be seen on the big screen on an iPhone. Why?

Convenience and privacy. And I'm laughing a little at your definition of serious. This is erotica. A lot of it is not especially well written erotica. What the author intended ranges from the cheap thrill of knowing someone else is panties-diving to their words, to the slightly more sinister position of trying to advance a counter-cultural viewpoint. Everyone's on-board with the former; as someone who dabbles in the latter, I can tell you it's a somewhat vain hope and goes over the head of most readers. In short, what the author intends is clouded by things more relevant than formatting, mostly the aforementioned panties diving thing.

To Chloe's point, for many people (in an increasingly wide age range), the phone is the one online device that's always with you, and your mom/spouse/bf/whatever can't see what you do on it, unlike your computer. For porn and erotica, it's literally the party in your pants that ever ends, and your attendance is 'anon' with regard to anyone you care about (assuming you don't care about governments, and the evidence suggests you don't). The internet has ALWAYS been about sexuality, straight back to the days of usenet where the most popular newsgroup had a tagline of "megabytes and megabytes of copyright violations." Now of course it's petabytes but not much else has changed.

So yeah there's a large population of serious (=horny) readers reading on their phone under the covers (and the handful of readers I've talked to at least have admitted to starting here at ages down to 14). Reading on phones is never going away and will probably be the major mechanism of consumption, at least until they get neural implants working. Which in my opinion they shouldn't.

 

[Green_Knight]

...and your mom/spouse/bf/whatever can't see what you do on it, unlike your computer.

Believe that at your peril. My step-daughter discovered that her dad was having an affair when she asked if she could use his phone and he absent-mindedly agreed, just as a text came through from his girlfriend. Quick trip to the divorce lawyers.

And phones are bloody easy to hack into and find out what you're looking at, and many companies log the usage of phones they issue to employees.

 

[Green_Knight]

I was using +++ on its own line to mark scene changes, but I've switched to .odt and now +++'s annoying because it expands to something else. Glancing online, I didn't see definitive suggestions. What do people do?

Use some nice ornaments?

Oops, sorry, forgot that this is Lit and it's only heard of one unreadable typeface.

 

[RejectReality]

There's nothing they really can do about it. Google and Apple both decided they weren't going to authorize any adult apps and purged everything adult that was in their stores at the time.

Without that authorized status, which is unlikely to ever be granted, the scary warnings and hoop-jumping is here to stay.

The best Lit could hope to do is put instructions on the download page saying that the warning is a standard one for all unofficial apps and nothing to worry about. How many skeptical people is that going to convince?

They might be able to provide instructions on how to change your settings to allow install for a few of the most popular devices, but anyone who doesn't have those would be on their own. Every device seems to put those settings under a different heading, and sometimes sub-heading.

That list of instructions could very well be what makes people say, "Fuck it!" as well.

Modern devices make apps that only have the purpose of displaying the web content in a device-friendly manner are dinosaurs, anyway. Google's standards are forcing all websites to make their sites device-friendly, so such apps are redundancies.

That might be something they should work on. They being Lit.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

Believe that at your peril. My step-daughter discovered that her dad was having an affair when she asked if she could use his phone and he absent-mindedly agreed, just as a text came through from his girlfriend. Quick trip to the divorce lawyers.

And phones are bloody easy to hack into and find out what you're looking at, and many companies log the usage of phones they issue to employees.

Most people with secrets to keep know better than to hand phones out, and if they don't, maybe they're not really cut out for secrets. Phone given to you by employers should always assumed to be open to the employers, just like all the rest of their gear. As for phones being easy to hack into, recall the FBI trying to simply unlock an iPhone they had unlimited access to and how long it took them. I'm certain the NSA can do better but I don't think they're too interested in anyone's porn habit, except for collecting anything really good you might find. Mom and Dad, or girlfriend, have no chance.

There is no perfect secrecy in this world, unless maybe you build the hardware and write the software. But for a teen keeping reading habit secrets (and other kinds of secrets) from parents, phones are the best balance of convenience and privacy going. There's a reason snapchat and its derivatives are so wildly popular.

 

[ChloeTzang]

Oops, sorry, forgot that this is Lit and it's only heard of one unreadable typeface.

OMG? Was that being sarcastic? LOL. I think we all understand that sense of frustration. With just a little forethought and planning and not so much work this site could be so much better, but hey, we're just the writers, what do we know....

 

[Zeb_Carter]

OMG? Was that being sarcastic? LOL. I think we all understand that sense of frustration. With just a little forethought and planning and not so much work this site could be so much better, but hey, we're just the writers, what do we know....

Forethought was used, back in 1996 when this site was probably first thought about. I remember I had just gotten a brand new Compaq Pentium Pro with Win 95. We just up graded from Win 3.1. The browser the company used was Netscape because Internet Explorer wouldn't run until SP1. Html had a limited set of tags. ASP hadn't even been created and PHP had just been released two years back n 1994. HTML 2.0 wasn't released until 1995 so most websites were still using HTML 1.

For a system that is about 20 years old, it's not all that bad.

 

[ChloeTzang]

Forethought was used, back in 1996 when this site was probably first thought about. I remember I had just gotten a brand new Compaq Pentium Pro with Win 95. We just up graded from Win 3.1. The browser the company used was Netscape because Internet Explorer wouldn't run until SP1. Html had a limited set of tags. ASP hadn't even been created and PHP had just been released two years back n 1994. HTML 2.0 wasn't released until 1995 so most websites were still using HTML 1.

For a system that is about 20 years old, it's not all that bad.

Wow. 1996? I'm thinking back now. I'd have been pushing to be in pre-school maybe, just. My age is showing. I had no idea Lit's been around that long. I guess asstr must have been before then even, coz that interface is just .... stone age?

 

[NotWise]

Wow. 1996? I'm thinking back now. I'd have been pushing to be in pre-school maybe, just. My age is showing. I had no idea Lit's been around that long.

The site started operating in 1998 and I must have found it around 2000 (but I didn't stay long). There have been changes, but it still has much the same look. Consider how easily confused people are by changes in a site's look and feel--and how grumpy they get about it--and you might see why Laurel and Manu have been so conservative about changes.

I griped about the control panel problem last weekend and Laurel let me know that she and Manu worked on it for 15 hours the day the problem started and that she's had about 10 days away from the site in nineteen years. Keep that in mind, too.

 

[sr71plt]

I griped about the control panel problem last weekend and Laurel let me know that she and Manu worked on it for 15 hours the day the problem started and that she's had about 10 days away from the site in nineteen years. Keep that in mind, too.

I did keep in mind that you both griped about the site and griped about anyone else griping about the site.

 

[ChloeTzang]

I griped about the control panel problem last weekend and Laurel let me know that she and Manu worked on it for 15 hours the day the problem started and that she's had about 10 days away from the site in nineteen years. Keep that in mind, too.

Ohhh, I'm not going to gripe much. Lit's given me an outlet for my writing that I really value. It's not like Wattpad would let my stories thru without a lot of rewriting that would steer me away from where I want to be. And I like Lit a lot better than asstr. Haven't really looked at anything else coz once I looked at Lit, I liked it enough to stay.

I'm just keeping my fingers crossed on the modernization of the interface. And the mobile app side of things. It's where the future is....

 

[KenNicottii]

Am I missing the point somehow?

About 99% of my Literotica consumption is through a Windows browser (IE, Edge, Firefox, etc.) on a PC or tablet. Every so often I’ll grab my iPhone and use Safari if it's more convenient. I’ve never had any issues whatsoever re formatting or reading ease. To be complete, I just now got out my seldom used Galaxy backup phone and accessed Lit for the first time: stories, lists, forum. No issues. I even switched over to the mobile version. Other than not seeing a link for the forum, it seemed different but OK.

Why would someone choose to use a dedicated app that may or may not display the content as expected?

 

[Hypoxia]

Am I missing the point somehow? <... > Why would someone choose to use a dedicated app that may or may not display the content as expected?

For me, because I can pre-load 11 stories or chapters each on the phone or tablet to read offline, far from cell or WiFi signals. We've been dry-camp RVing in remote Southwestern locales. Ain't no connectivity at Apache Creek, New Mexico, not without a pricey sat.system we ain't got. The app is cheaper.

 

[RejectReality]

Exactly. And when the new interface rolls out site-wide, it will be even more pointless, because the whole site will be device friendly, as demanded by Google.

If the app does indeed let you preload stories to be read when you don't have an internet connection, that's at least a reason to have it.

If you're just using it to browse the site, you should really open your device's web browser of choice, save yourself some device storage space, and get the full formatting experience ta boot.

Am I missing the point somehow?

About 99% of my Literotica consumption is through a Windows browser (IE, Edge, Firefox, etc.) on a PC or tablet. Every so often I’ll grab my iPhone and use Safari if it's more convenient. I’ve never had any issues whatsoever re formatting or reading ease. To be complete, I just now got out my seldom used Galaxy backup phone and accessed Lit for the first time: stories, lists, forum. No issues. I even switched over to the mobile version. Other than not seeing a link for the forum, it seemed different but OK.

Why would someone choose to use a dedicated app that may or may not display the content as expected?

 

[KenNicottii]

A-ha, a lifestyle driven choice. I guess I haven’t needed Lit reading capability yet when I occasionally get outside of cell coverage. Of course most airports block Lit as a pornographic website (hard to argue otherwise), so cellular is the work-around there. Perhaps some users wouldn't want the Lit app visible on their phone.

If I were to pre-download w/o the app, I’d save each story, page by page, as a MIME HTML file (a Web archiving format, using a simple “Save As” in IE from the File drop-down menu bar; other browsers need some tweaking to achieve this). Since Lit pages are relatively rudimentary, they need less than 500KB each. This format should grab audio files, too, but I haven’t tried that yet.

For me, because I can pre-load 11 stories or chapters each on the phone or tablet to read offline, far from cell or WiFi signals. We've been dry-camp RVing in remote Southwestern locales. Ain't no connectivity at Apache Creek, New Mexico, not without a pricey sat.system we ain't got. The app is cheaper.

 

[BuckyDuckman]

Once again: Maybe half of LIT readers use the Android app, which ignores all HTML tags. No centering or indents; no bonds, underlines, or italics. None of that fancy stuff. Assume that readers will only view left-aligned plaintext. Just delimit sections with a string of non-alphanumerics. Keep it simple, hey?

This is bothersome to me if it's true.

Does the Android app recognize my favorite way of notating a break - that would be with an extra space between the paragraphs?

If I don't use an extra line break, then I use "* * * * *" - but that always feels like more of a break than I want.

 

[Hypoxia]

Does the Android app recognize my favorite way of notating a break - that would be with an extra space between the paragraphs?

To me, the app's greatest weakness is CR/LF handling -- it regularly omits a required LF, I think at points that are page breaks on standard LIT (HTML) pages. Big deal. If I note a missing LF, I shrug and read on.

As for stories demanding fancy formatting to convey their messages, I can't help but think of "sell the sizzle, not the beef." IMHO the meat of the story usually outweighs the graphic effects. Yes, some tales (and poems) exploit typographic features to effectively flavor the reading experience. And some printed books are 2 inches high and twelve inches long, or vice versa. Yes, special effects are fun. But they may take some time to decode...

 

[sr71plt]

This is bothersome to me if it's true.

Does the Android app recognize my favorite way of notating a break - that would be with an extra space between the paragraphs?

If I don't use an extra line break, then I use "* * * * *" - but that always feels like more of a break than I want.

I don't know what an Android app does in that case but some story Web sites will just delete the extra space (extra extra space; almost all of them have an extra space between all paragraphs. Lit. does) as being a mistake. If I got that as an editor, I'd have to ask you whether it was on purpose or a mistake--and then, if it was meant as a section break, I'd put a proper one in so that the readers were clear it was a section break.

 

[CeasarBoobage]

I was using +++ on its own line to mark scene changes, but I've switched to .odt and now +++'s annoying because it expands to something else. Glancing online, I didn't see definitive suggestions. What do people do?

The one thing I've only seen a few times in this thread is similar to what I do. OpenOffice/LibreOffice does stupid stuff with repeated symbols, which I use for separating the header/intro before the story starts. Hitting 'Return' three times before going up two lines and adding those characters will usually prevent those big lines.

My preference is to not use things that would turn into ugly formatting. I love women's breasts, so for a long time I've marked scene changes with text boobies.

( .)(. )

Am I missing the point somehow?

About 99% of my Literotica consumption is through a Windows browser (IE, Edge, Firefox, etc.) on a PC or tablet. Every so often I’ll grab my iPhone and use Safari if it's more convenient. I’ve never had any issues whatsoever re formatting or reading ease. To be complete, I just now got out my seldom used Galaxy backup phone and accessed Lit for the first time: stories, lists, forum. No issues. I even switched over to the mobile version. Other than not seeing a link for the forum, it seemed different but OK.

Why would someone choose to use a dedicated app that may or may not display the content as expected?

Why use a phone's built-in texting app? There's tons of apps you can download that will do the exact same thing, but with a slightly different look to it, and hopefully some extra goodies that make it "worth it".

In case you haven't spent a lot of time around anyone anyone under ~30, their phone is their life support system. Who wants to look at a website in a web browser? It's "normal" for people to want an app that doesn't do anything other than run a streamlined web browser for one (and only one) website. There's a reason that Amazon has an app that doesn't do anything different than their website does - for tons of people it "feels" better to use the app than a web browser.

And please, do your PC a favor and don't run IE (or Edge) on your computer.

 

[Green_Knight]

...In case you haven't spent a lot of time around anyone anyone under ~30, their phone is their life support system. Who wants to look at a website in a web browser? It's "normal" for people to want an app that doesn't do anything other than run a streamlined web browser for one (and only one) website. There's a reason that Amazon has an app that doesn't do anything different than their website does - for tons of people it "feels" better to use the app than a web browser...

Commercial apps are a con targeted at the lazy, stupid and indolent. Companies know that once they've got you to download their app you'll use that and routinely buy from them rather than go into a browser and google say "cheap flights", which will throw up all their – probably better value – competitors.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

For me, because I can pre-load 11 stories or chapters each on the phone or tablet to read offline, far from cell or WiFi signals. We've been dry-camp RVing in remote Southwestern locales. Ain't no connectivity at Apache Creek, New Mexico, not without a pricey sat.system we ain't got. The app is cheaper.

Sheesh, if you manage to get that far offline, just unplug and go look at the scenery. The rare times I get to run away from home, I pick places where my cell phone can't ring. I'd leave it home if it wasn't occasionally useful as a flashlight and camera...

What the site really needs to do is add a Download Story button. (Yes, I know, piracy. But the pirates already have much better tools. There's freeware to clone entire sites and there's no way to block it, short of noticing how fast someone is "reading stories" and choking off the access.)

You can "download stories" right now, it's just a pain. You can copy+paste each page of a story and assemble the pieces in a document. You even get formatting preserved. It's a pain on a laptop and about unthinkably annoying on a phone, but it's possible; all the Download button would do is make it convenient. And the download button could introduce ads into your copy, which answers the objection that Lit would see less revenue.

I'm with other folk who roll their eyes a bit at apps that do what a website can do. I'm no fan of browsing on a phone, but an app is just another way for corporations to not only lock in their customer base, but try to collect information on the users. They're worse than browsers, which already share far too much information.