By Clare Joy

Did you know that you have a library full of exciting material on your phone? With Worldreader Books in a few easy clicks you could be reading our free articles on health, falling in love with a contemporary short story or browsing classic fiction from some of the best writers of our time.

We’re always adding new books and looking for great new stories so we wanted to keep you in the loop. In March we had almost 310,000 readers, mainly from Nigeria, India and Ethiopia. Using biNu’s clever cloud based technology, we brought you local and international stories; classics and brand new tales, along with useful non-fictional content on Health and Sexual Education.

The most popular book was Nigerian author Myne Whitman’s A Heart to Mend. This steamy page-clicker is set in Lagos, where reality is getting in the way of romance. Next up, people are reading African stories, such as easy reader Bee Ninja by Ghanaian writer Diana Mcbagonluri. Romantics and adventure addicts are clicking through Louise McCann’s Someone like me and Fiona Snyckers’ teen series, Sisterz. Stats show that popular classics include The Count of Monte Cristo.
How do we do get such great books onto our App? We have great partners, such as biNu, many international publishers and authors and… You! We need help from our readers, to find out what books you’re reading and what you want to read.
Tell us on twitter @worldreaders #booksforall or by taking part in a quiz.

Curious about Worldreader? We’re a non-profit dedicated to transforming how the world reads by using new digital mediums. We work with schools and organizations to bring e-readers, like the Kindle, to children who have traditionally had poor access to paper books. Devices like the Kindle help reduce transportation costs and enable one child to carry around an entire library. We’re also on cell phones, just like the one you are using, so that anyone with a cell phone can also have access to a world of great books and valuable information.

See more at www.worldreader.org

This long awaited feature is now live on biNu! The way it works is as follows: If a new biNu-to-biNu chat message is received in your Messenger Inbox while you are inside biNu, the notification icon will appear. The notification is a green button with an asterisk (*) located at the bottom of the screen between Menu and Back. To navigate to the notification screen, you can simply click the * key on your keypad, or if you have a touch screen device, touch the button directly. The notification icon will disappear once you have navigated to the Inbox of the Messenger app. We hope to add more types of notifications to the system soon.

Finally! Google just added more languages to their translate API. For a few months, some languages were supported via the web interface but not via the API. We are sure that this will please so many of our users who have been eagerly awaiting their languages to be supported, especially Bengali and Urdu. The new languages are: Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Bengali, Georgian, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu. Enjoy!

With the popularity of instant messaging exploding across the mobile world, especially in emerging markets, we are pleased to be able to offer unlimited access to Facebook Messenger on our platform. The Messaging interface can be accessed via the main Facebook app or directly from the biNu home screen. We intend to add other messaging networks such as Google Talk and a new biNu Messaging service as soon as possible.

Visit m.binu.com on your mobile now to download biNu and try our Facebook Messenger, Twitter and many other apps for yourself.

biNu has always had a large catalog of apps that are accessible from every installed app – but for some of our users it hasn’t been obvious how to find them.

biNu v3.2.1 changes all that with a new icon-based home screen that will be familiar to smart phone users. Not only does this provide instant access to our most popular apps, it also allows users to
(i) easily search through our entire app catalog
(ii) customize their home screen by adding, deleting or removing app icons

To enjoy this genuine smart phone experience on your feature phone (or to speed up your smart phone!) get biNu v3.2.1 now! Download from m.binu.com

Upgrades to the biNu Messenger app and Google Translate mean that you can now translate messages in your inbox to any language. If you wish to translate an outgoing message, enter your text in the Google Translate app, choose translation language and then use the ‘Send’ option in the menu. This will take you to the Messenger app where you can send the translated text as per normal. We hope our users from all 208 countries around the world enjoy this new feature!

Today we released a feature allowing registered biNu users to send unlimited emails from their mobile phones! This means that registered users now also have an email address (actually they have 2 – [phone-number]@binu.com and [username]@binu.com). For some users in many of our supported countries this offers them a service that they would probably never have dreamed possible.