I stopped watching MTV in college, and I haven't really had a problem being sad since then. You should reevaluate where and how you get sensory input and consider tossing some things out the window.
This is just their news website to promote themselves so people don't think they're doing a crappy job. Their regular website still exists and it just as boring and functional as ever: http://city.milwaukee.gov/police
Consumer apps might be a hard sell, although Steam might soon have its own app store. If you're selling a business app, then yes, you can easily succeed outside the app store.
I would guess PR would be more successful. Have you tried asking for people to try you out in the forums devoted to developers? iphonesdk; MacRumors has a new one for business and marketing; 148Apps has a business page with developer news. Just sending emails to noted indie developers asking them to try you (and taking out you twitter facebook requirement) might get you better traction.
Do you need a log-in? Can't people use it without logging in? I would think you might want to go long-in free for a while and see how you do. Are you sure its not holding you back? What's your bounce rate? Do people show up and then disappear when they get to the log-in page?
I love it! Some tabs would be awesome, as would multiple background images (just saying that because I'm having trouble with them today, I doubt many people use multiple images)
That's what I thought too. Not to mention oddly requiring a Facebook or Twitter log-in when so many people here complain about it (and all the stories about being hacked lately).
Coding. I wish I could just tell a computer what I wanted my app to do and it would write the code. I mean actually tell it, Siri style. My second biggest challenge is selling. Finding the right people to call or email, finding their contact info, keeping track of who I have called, who has responded, etc.
I agree. If people skip to a section of a coding book all the time, an author could decide it needs expansion or might base a whole other title on the subject.
You might just be A/B testing your samples or your jacket text. I'm guessing a lot of authors would agree with you that they don't want to change specific passages in their stories. But I see a lot of them working on making their sales better by providing better blurbs. It's the equivalent of being able to change your outside back cover text to get people more interested.
I'm guessing this info isn't on the website because you haven't got around to it yet, but knowing how things work is what attracts me to services. I'm wary of companies that claim to do things but don't say how it works, so you should consider putting up a "How-it-works" page. Do you have a list of supported formats?
Just another comment about the pricing, 500,000 is a LOT of readers. Very few indie publishers (at least single authors) are near that number for a single book. Having a range for authors between 5,000 - 100,000 might be a better sweet spot.
How does the developer get your code inside their book? Also, you might want to consider an intermediate plan. We're over 1000 readers (after a few months), but I'm guessing we're years away from 500,000 readers.
Could this work in a hybrid app for iOS? Specifically, we publish a hybrid iPad app using an open source framework called Baker (http://bakerframework.com/). I know a lot of people publish books using it as well. Only problem is, Google Analytics doesn't track HTML pageviews inside an app, and most in-app analytics are geared towards native apps. Setting up analytics is painful.
There was just an HN post on portfolio sites: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4284663. One of the things mentioned in the articles was a portfolio blog, mainly for coders where they talk about the technical stuff they did behind the scenes while showing some pictures of the final products.
We're an iPad travel magazine and are up to about 350 downloads a month. No paid developers, or any developers actually, we rely on a pretty cool open source tool called Baker and I've self-taught myself bits of code here and there to make it work. No profit yet, the ad selling starts next month, so we'll find out then if it will be a success. :)
I made Rounded-ness up for lack of a better word. Check out https://parse.com/ or http://www.hipmunk.com/
The look and feel is close to your button on the bottom of your main page. Rounded corners, bold fonts, subtle gradients, drop shadows, icons with depth and shine elements. The button is fine, but the chart on your front page looks more Windows-XP while sites these days take their cues from iOS.
You would have to know a lot of serious entrepreneurs and a lot of serious angel investors to make that happen. Crowdsourcing adds a regulatory hurdle, but it makes the money easier.
I like it. Design seems a little dated - its missing the rounded-ness of today's apps - but very functional. How do you plan on seeding enough entrepreneurs and angel investors to make it useful? Sadly, I think if you used the word "crowdfunding" you'd have people signing up in droves. Any plans to explore that avenue?
I'd go with the first one. You can make it scale with other ideas later on or with new products, and you'll have a solid base to work off of. The viral app idea is a crapshoot these days.