You wouldn’t throw a fancy dinner party in a 7-Eleven. You wouldn’t hold a symphony concert in a subway station, or teach a meditation class on a tilt-a-whirl ride.

So why does anyone expect readers to read long articles on the Web?

Call me a traitor to my kind, but I think the World Wide Web is a terrible medium for long-form writing, precisely because of the mismatch between content and venue. The basic problem is that browsers are for browsing. Today’s commercial Web, where no morsel of exposition is more than one saccade away from a link, a logo, or an ad, is an impossible place to do any deep thinking.

No one designed this outcome. It’s just that the medium grew up so fast, evolving in less than 20 years from a hypertext file-sharing system at a European physics laboratory into today’s infinite digital bazaar. There wasn’t much time to think about whether it really made sense to translate our collective creative output into HTML, dump it onto Web servers, and pay for the whole operation with hyperlinked ads that, by their very nature, take readers away from whatever they’re trying to read.

Fortunately, there are folks scouting for ways out of this mess. Over the last few years, programmer-entrepreneurs like Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, have come up with a series of clever applications for separating or “parsing” the Web’s text from its context. This new menagerie of minimalism includes browser-based apps that zap the clutter around Web posts and replace it with a peaceful white background. It also includes mobile apps that let you store these pared-down posts for on-the-go consumption whenever you choose. And in this general category, I’d also include a few new curation services intended to spotlight contemporary and classic long-form writing and make it easier to consume.

I’ve picked 10 of my favorite reading apps and services for quick summaries on the following pages. If you’re like me and you spend a lot of time using the desktop or mobile Web, yet you also love getting lost in a long, thoughtful non-fiction article, then you’ll find some of these services to be life-changing.

But I wouldn’t say that we’ve reached an apotheosis—not by a long shot. At best, the Zen approach to repackaging Web articles is only one element of the solution, and it’s not one that will scale up very well. Already, critics are arguing that this kind of republishing is impolite at best, copyright infringement at worst. As soon as the big online publishers realize how many people are bypassing ads by saving parsed text to Instapaper and the other reading apps, they’ll freak out, the same way broadcasters did when TiVo came along. (It’s no accident that people have called the reading apps “DVRs for the Web.”)

What’s needed now are business models that would make publishers happy about providing more content in these ad-free environments. But we’re a long way from finding payment mechanisms that appeal to readers—let alone equitable ways to split up reading-app revenue between publishers, authors, developers, and platform providers, as a tussle last year between Readability and Apple illustrated (more on that below).

For now, damn the torpedoes—here’s my list of the 10 most interesting and useful reading apps and curation services. I’m going to describe the apps first, because once you understand those, the curation services will make a lot more sense. (For a single-page version of this article that you can export to one of the reading apps, click here.)

First app: Clearly.

… Next Page »

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Vijay Gaur sees the book going in the same direction that the mobile phone has.

“We are converting a book into a platform,” says Gaur. “Your phone is becoming more powerful by applications. We are now applying that same concept to books.”

That’s the idea behind his Medford, MA-based startup, AppBrick. The company, which graduated this past August from the New York edition of the startup accelerator DreamIt Ventures, hope to put a layer of interactive applications on top of e-books, from novels to textbooks to children’s stories.

Publishers upload their e-books into the AppBrick platform for the iPad, select which apps they want to add on top of it, and push go. It all ties into AppBrick’s original mission of giving businesses “a very simple easy to use tool to launch applications very fast and manage content through a Web based dashboard,” Gaur says.

Though books have evolved to hit digital readers, overall they remain very “flat,” and publishers are looking for a way to better capture their audiences, says Gaur. One set of AppBrick applications enables readers to share sections of the book via channels like Twitter, e-mail, or Facebook, as well as connect with authors via those social media channels. Readers can do all that without leaving the page they’re reading.

But AppBrick’s platform does far more to enhance the overall book experience, Gaur says. Readers can use a Wiki reference app to look up a term they’re unfamiliar with, connect with tutors via video, or discuss a chapter with other readers via a voice-over IP connection. One app enables users to draw and share notes on a virtual whiteboard. All of these functions appear as pop-up windows over the e-book page readers are already on.

AppBrick’s goal is to offer a platform where other third-party developers can create custom applications. The AppBrick core reader application would be free to users, but they would pay for purchases of additional applications. For example, they would pay tutors for lessons related to textbook content. AppBrick would take a cut of those purchases if the system takes off, Gaur says. It also plans to charge publishers for its service.

Gaur says these functions give publishers and authors analytics and insight about their audience that’s not available through traditional paper and e-books. They can understand what chapters readers are consuming, how they’re discussing it with others, and where they’re plugging in the interactive apps.

AppBrick also offers another set of features that allows users to create interactive storyboards, record their own voice for dialogue, and share those creations. “It publicizes the book and increases the creativity in the kids,” says Gaur. Those features are targeted at children’s books, but can also work with adult texts.

Other companies, like Push Pop Press (acquired by Facebook), have worked to make e-books more interactive and social media-oriented. AppBrick is a much cheaper solution though, because with it, interactive e-books individually don’t need to be coded from the ground up, says Gaur.” “They upload books and apply features,” says Gaur. “The beautiful aspect is we are converting the book into a platform and it keeps on improving regularly.”

AppBrick is testing its platform with a few different publishers and is looking to enlist more, as well as attract users. The company is running on $30,000 that Gaur has put in, as well as $20,000 from DreamIt, but is looking to gain more traction with its reader and publisher communities before going after a bigger funding round, says Gaur.

It’s up to the publishing houses to push their texts through AppBrick so their readers can get their hands on the interactive features. We’ll have to see who bites.

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In a joint announcement, Austin, TX-based Freescale Semiconductor and Cambridge, MA-based E Ink–which makes the “electronic ink” displays used in the Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader, and other e-book devices—said today they will work together to integrate the electronics that control E Ink’s displays with Freescale’s MX processors to create a single “system on a chip” for future e-reading devices. The collaboration “will enable several new markets, including e-newspapers and e-textbooks,” E Ink vice president of marketing Sriram Peruvemba said in the announcement.

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Well, this is the first time I’ve written my weekly column while wearing a tuxedo. No, I’m not on my way home from an inauguration ball, or campaigning for higher style standards among reporters. As I write this, I’m getting ready to emcee Xconomy’s Battle of the Tech Bands 2. Our preparations for the event have eaten up most of the day, which is why today’s column will be brief (by my own wordy standards, anyway).

I try to keep an eye on the e-book world, and some interesting stuff has been cropping up lately. First, Amazon has continued to experience surprising success with its Kindle e-book reader. I’ve panned the Kindle in the past, and wouldn’t even think about buying one myself until the company makes major design improvements. (Which it may be about to do—a new version is supposedly due this spring.) But a lot of people seem to like the thing, and after Oprah herself endorsed it in October, a pre-Christmas rush of orders cleaned out Amazon’s entire stock; there’s now an 8- to 10-week wait for Kindles. (And by that time the new one might be out.)

Which leaves an opening of sorts for competitors. So it’s no surprise to see iPhone app developers moving into that gap, given the attractions of the Apple device’s high-resolution display and touch-based interface.

But as much as I love my iPhone and dislike the current Kindle, I’m not sure Apple’s gadget will take hold as a serious platform for e-books. The main problem, as I see it, is that the iPhone’s screen is too small to hold much text, meaning readers have to turn a page every few seconds. If you want to try out the e-book experience on an iPhone, however, I do have two apps to recommend.

First, there’s Stanza from Lexcycle, a free app for the iPhone or the iPod Touch that gives you immediate, over-the-air access to a very large collection of free public-domain works (I’m part of the way through Middlemarch) as well as new, paperback-priced works from the Fictionwise catalog. Stanza has a well-thought-out interface, including a Cover Flow-like title browser. What I like best about it is the way a simple tap on the right side of the screen takes you to the next page. Using the iPhone’s usual “flick” gesture to go to the next page, the way some other apps do, is actually overkill for this simple task, in my opinion—all that flicking will wear out your index finger surprisingly quickly.

Then there’s Iceberg Reader from ScrollMotion. Unlike Stanza, Iceberg isn’t a stand-alone application that’s able to load many different books; rather, it comes as part of an all-in-one package when you buy and download individual book titles from the iTunes App Store, such as the marvelous fantasy novel The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. It’s got an extremely nice look and feel. You almost get the sense that this is the e-book reader application Apple would have designed, if it had included such a utility as a native app on the iPhone. Iceberg Reader does use the flicking convention to scroll text along the screen, but it’s well-executed, without too much springiness or momentum imparted by each flick, so I don’t find it too annoying.

Meanwhile, there are more companies trying different takes on the much larger, E-Ink-based “electronic paper” interface that’s at the heart of both the Kindle and the earlier Sony e-book readers. The New York Times published a nice roundup of the current options just before Christmas . I’m intrigued by the eSlick Reader from Foxit Software, which seems to do almost everything the Kindle does for a lot less money ($229 compared to Amazon’s exorbitant $359), and by the uber-minimalist Txtr, a 3G/Bluetooth/Wi-Fi device that was panned yesterday by Crunchgear but has a much more elegant look (at least judging from the early product shots) than the other reading devices out there.

Of course, any new e-book reading device or program is only as good as the catalog of books that it can access. On that score, Amazon has a huge and perhaps insurmountable advantage over all of its competitors. If the Kindle 2.0 includes the right combination of improvements (meaning, if it’s a lot less ugly and clunky than the first one) it will probably cement Amazon’s lead.

Regardless of what Amazon does with the new Kindle, we can probably look forward to more improvements in display technology, both from E-Ink and from makers of standard LCD displays like the iPhone’s. In a newsletter just yesterday, David Pogue of the New York Times reported claims by LCD makers at the Consumer Electronics Show that their technology is “only 50 percent evolved,” meaning we should expect even brighter, sharper, more energy-efficient LCDs in the relatively near future. Happy reading!

Update, February 6, 2009: This week Google introduced an iPhone-accessible version of its Google Book Search service, meaning iPhone owners in the U.S. now have free access to the more than 1.5 million public-domain books Google has scanned at major libraries. As Greg has reported, Amazon immediately responded with an announcement that Kindle e-books will soon be available on mobile phones, presumably including the iPhone. All the one-upsmanship, as the big players in the online book space rush to make more content available on their preferred platforms but also free up content so that it can be consumed on rival platforms, can only be good for readers in the long run.

For a full list of my columns, check out the World Wide Wade Archive. You can also subscribe to the column via RSS or e-mail.

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An “electronic paper” screen created by Cambridge’s E Ink is the heart of the new Amazon Kindle e-book reading device, introduced yesterday amidst grand pronouncements about the beginning of a new era of electronic book publishing and reading. “This is the future of reading. It will be everywhere,” said business writer Michael Lewis, who ought to know; he’s famous for writing The New New Thing, about the creation of the first commercial Web browser. No less a personage than Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, calls the Kindle “ideal” for the traveling reader. Which is hard to argue with; the device can hold 200 books in its memory, yet thanks to the light and power-efficient E Ink screen, it weighs less than a paperback and can be used for at least 30 hours before needing to be recharged.

Kindle, three years in the making (and already sold out, according to Amazon’s product page), is a project with great personal significance to CEO Jeff Bezos, who emceed a ceremony launching the device in New York City yesterday and admits on Amazon’s front page that he is “infatuated with the idea of electronic books.” I feel the same way: I would be truly delighted if someone introduced an electronic reading system with the magic combination of usability and price needed to finally pry the reading public away from printed books, which, while highly evolved and quite wonderful in their way, are part of a criminally wasteful publishing economy in which 25 percent of books are pulped each year without ever having been opened. Alas, Kindle is not it.

The electronic paper technology created by E Ink, which I profiled at length on November 1, does go a long way toward solving the usability part of the problem. The 6-inch Kindle screen—which is identical to the screen used in a competing e-book device, the Sony PRS-505 Reader—uses E Ink’s proprietary “VizPlex” film, in which transparent sheets of electrodes create patterns by attracting or repelling magnetically charged black and white particles that float inside tiny microcapsules. Like paper itself, the display uses reflected rather than transmitted light, and is therefore much easier on the eyes than conventional LCD screens. Dave Jackson, E Ink’s director of marketing and planning, says the version of VizPlex that E Ink created for the Amazon and Sony devices reflects 40 percent of the light it receives—up from 32 percent in the company’s previous generation of e-paper, and approaching the reflectance of newsprint.

But I’m sorry to say—at the risk of repeating myself, since I also wrote a downbeat review of the Sony Reader for Technology Review in January—that E Ink’s technology isn’t enough to make Kindle the breakthrough e-reading device that I and thousands of other e-book fans have been waiting for. For one thing, and I won’t belabor the point (because others have been making it repeatedly), it’s ugly. It’s all angles and corners and buttons and wheels. If the iPhone were a sleek black-and-chrome swan, Kindle would be its geeky gosling cousin. Even the dot-com-era Rocket eBook, a much heavier, bulkier, LCD-based e-book device made by NuvoMedia (where—disclosure time—I worked for about 18 months from late 1999 to 2001), was more elegant.

But even if the Kindle were beautiful, there would still be the problem of price. Price, meaning both the $399 cost of the device itself—a very steep admission ticket to the world of electronic reading—as well as the $9.99 that Amazon is charging for New York Times bestsellers and other new releases. Yes, $9.99 is a big markdown compared to the typical $25 cover price for a new hardcover (and even compared to the $13 to $18 you’ll pay for a hardcover at Amazon). But it’s not nearly big enough. For better or worse, consumers have gotten used to paying low-single-digit dollar amounts for electronic content. A song on iTunes still goes for $0.99, a TV show for $1.99. Netflix rentals will run you $1 or $2 per DVD, depending on how many you go through in a month. It may be a travesty that undermines all the great traditions of literature and authorship, but my bet is that people simply won’t pay $10 for access to the electronic version of a novel, which is, after all, just a few hundred kilobytes of 1s and 0s (and with an e-book you don’t even get the paper this information is usually written on).

The habit of reading among the English-speaking public—I’m talking about the mass public here, not the educated elite—has gone through at least two great flowerings. One was the era of the penny dreadfuls and dime novels, which ran from about 1840 to 1885. The second followed the invention of the mass-market paperback in the mid-1930s. Both revolutions in reading hinged on revolutions in printing technology and price; it simply became much cheaper to make and buy a book, and readers responded to the new plenty with savage appetites.

Something similar has happened on the Web, where virtually all written content is free, and which, thanks to the Internet terminals in public libraries and programs like One Laptop Per Child (where Amazon could have looked for some design lessons), is spreading beyond the middle- and upper-class homes that can afford computers. But no e-book reading or publishing system, and certainly not Kindle, has taken on the price challenge. In fact, Amazon’s system makes reading more expensive than before (unless you’re the sort who buys lots of hardcover books, in which case you’d still have to buy about 100 Kindle Editions before the discounts would cover the cost of the Kindle device).

I don’t know when, if ever, the economics of publishing will tilt in favor of e-books. It’s true, of course, that electronic gadgets always decline in cost over time—and if the Kindle dropped to around $199, I would probably buy one myself. (On that point, though, it’s not clear how quickly Amazon will be able to cut the Kindle’s price, since the VizPlex film in the screen, as I noted in my story about E Ink, remains a high-priced specialty item.) But the prices of Kindle Editions are probably even more critical to the overall success of the new publishing model Amazon is trying to create. For the Kindle system to catch on as a real alternative to print books, I think prices for new releases would need to drop to the $5 level or below.

And that’s just not going to happen—not as long as the New York publishers have anything to do with it. So for now, the Kindle and its remarkable e-paper screen will remain a curiosity—a toy for early adopters—and lots of real paper books will continue to be pulped every year as the same publishers struggle (and fail) to predict exactly how many copies of Lemony Snicket parents will buy for their children this Christmas. The future of reading is still safely in the future.

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