I really enjoy the ability to comment on individual paragraphs while reading on Ream. Any chance you’ll add options for authors to allow readers to share specific paragraphs to different social platforms with links back to the story or to the authors home page of choice (whether that’s a website or social media page or linktree or whatevs). Maybe with like a monthly share budget so people don’t like share the whole book for free or something?
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I am going to point over to Royal Road as a way to do this.
First, there is a robust comments section on each chapter. But the chapters are posted in a more discrete style, instead of the reading flowing between them.
When you highlight a sentence or section, you get the option to ‘suggest edit’, which pops up a window and you can then select Character edit (for typos) or Word edit (for bigger suggestions). It automatically processes changes in red and green and then adds it to the comment box. You can stack multiples of these in the same comment box automatically without overwriting anything.
Alternatively would be the google docs way, where you attach comments to a particular paragraph, but honestly I prefer the flow of having everything in the comments below the chapter.
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I’m talking about as a reader not as an author. As a reader I often enjoy commenting on paragraphs and would like the ability to share paragraphs on social media with like a link to the author or story on Ream. Also I’d like to stay on Ream and not hop to a competing product.
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I think this is a great idea. It reminds me of blog posts that have shareable quotes that can be immediately shared to Twitter.
Even better if it automatically tagged the author on the platform, too.
This would be really nice for getting more eyes on our work, and maybe it is also useful for learning what quotes people really connected with.
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Right??? I do have good ideas on occasion! Well rather I am a conduit for them from time to time.
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My description was from a reader’s Point of View. 
I was talking about each chapter having a comments section for the readers to talk in.
But I thought you meant to comment on the chapter, inside of Ream. Not to comment on the chapter, to then have the comment published on another platform with a link back.
Oh no, I’m referring to Reams existing commenting system that’s based on paragraphs only pushing it farther out to different social media platforms by sharing that block of text with some sort of link back to the Ream story or author.
This would be cool – Wattpad does this:
I swear they used to let you share to more than just Facebook, but that’s what’s there now. Their button doesn’t actually work for me, so I can’t check what happens after that. Think it shares it as an image? But I’m not sure.
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I will certainly add this on our list of things to look into.
I like the idea, and I understand its importance, but I also know how tight of security the tech team likes to keep things. So i’m not going to promise that we will do it, but we will look into it. I can just already see the confusion in me suggesting building a hole in the security of the eReader!
But it is a good idea! don’t let my comment let you think otherwise, these kind of ideas are the reason for the forum!
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The share option can be set to a limited number of characters or words. If the selection is longer than allowed, then the quote window would just highlight the excess in red, allowing the user to edit down (e.g. replace some words not necessary for sharing with ellipses) or delete the excess. If they don’t edit it down then the highlighted excess would be automatically deleted on publication to the social media platform.
There could even be a meme-style option where the quoted text gets a fancy display (like FB short posts). But in every such quote published, there would be an automatic link-back to the source of the quote.