This App That Turns Novels Into Text Messages Will Make You Read More

Prerna Gupta, Silicon Valley app developer, along with her husband Parag Chordia, came up with a brand new way to engage young people into reading again.

The couple wanted to make reading available to everyone at any point during the day, so Gupta and Chordia stumbled upon a new and potentially ground-breaking format that would eventually become Hooked.

As Big Think reports, Hooked is “he app that gives readers bite sized stories written as text messages between characters. Fiction in the form of text messages proved to be incredibly successful amongst young adults aged 13-24 and showed unprecedented completion rates.”

Hooked Has Attracted More Than 10 Million Readers

The Hooked app isn’t actually that new. Gupta launched the app in September 2015 and since then, Hooked has been a number one app in the U.S. app store on several occasion, while it has managed to attract over 10 million readers thus far.

Aside from its main feature – providing the work from established authors to their readers – the app also recruits and commissions undiscovered authors to write stories for this app and allows its users to write and submit their own work.

Hooked currently has a database of over 300,000 stories.

“Rather than destroy reading, Hooked makes reading engaging for a broad audience. We’ve heard from many teens who say they hate reading books, but they love reading in Hooked. It’s a gateway drug,” says Gupta.

The app seems to be working best with teenagers as even long books that are made up of several “episodes” can be broken up into 5-minute “reads” so the users are able to read on the go between classes or while commuting.

This way, young people can get hooked on fiction and reading rather than on social media. Cool beans.