Copy-editing if often associated with professional and expensive services that only businesses can afford. It is mostly the case, but Ediket’s team believes that there should be something between “no copy-editing” and expensive copy-editing. They also believe in a better interface for both copywriters and customers, which is why they build a nice interface that tries to mimic what users would do on paper. Even friendly copy-editing services such as Wordy don’t reach this level of simplicity and clarity in their interface. The service was launched in May 2014, and meeting with their team at GMV 2014 (a Korean tech/mobile conference) made me much more aware of what they were trying to do.
The Ediket team. Photo courtesy of RocketPunch
As it is the case with other distributed copy-editing services, you can create a “job”, and upload your text. After that, one or several copy-editors can take a stab at improving it, and you can select the best version. Upon selection, some credits are given to the copy-editor, who can redeem them for gifts, for example. You can see a video demo here:
When you first create an account, you are given 2000 credits which you can use to pay the copy-editors. Beyond that, you will have to buy additional credits. Whether or not the service ends up being as “affordable” as the Ediket creators envisioned will largely depend on supply and demand, so it’s hard to forecast, but from a systemic point of view, Ediket is quite unique.
It’s not hard to imagine that good non-professionals copy-editors could make a little money on the side by providing work that would be satisfactory to their customers. If it is cheap enough, this could create a copy-editing market in new areas.
I suggested to the Ediket team that they should white-label their platform to freelance.com or other sites that already provide this type of jobs. This is something that is currently under consideration and the team hopes that something will materialize soon.
The market place and neat user-interface seem like an excellent combo to attract a much larger crowd to the copy-editing space. A lot consumers that would normally be put off by the classic editing process, may be more attracted by this alternative. The service just launched this week, so the market place is still fairly empty.