Like Amazon’s Kindle web app from last August, the Kobo web app is really a website that can store data on your device even when you’re offline. This means you can download and read ebooks without a live connection. It also means Kobo can offer it to (for example) iPad and iPhone users directly, instead of having to request Apple’s permission first.

But unlike Amazon’s Kindle web app, the interface is designed to benefit Kobo more than its customers, by reserving about two thirds of the screen for Kobo’s own use. The difference is striking when you look at the two web apps side by side, so let’s do just that:

The green parts that I’ve marked indicate the “store” section of the interface.

On the Kindle web app, it’s all about creating a user experience that emphasizes reading — it’s all about your ebooks, your library. You’re in control of what you see each time you open the web app. And when you’re ready to shop, you tap the button and the entire interface switches to the Kindle Store. Amazon’s approach is more sensible, because if you’re a customer/reader, your primary need when you open an ereader app is to read; shopping for more ebooks is important, but secondary.

It’s true that there are lots of ereader apps that can fulfill that primary reading need, but unfortunately for the vast majority of us, each retailer’s DRM/format scheme prevents us from straying beyond their custom apps. We’re stuck with the app that the retailer provides — and that means if you’re a Kobo customer, more likely than not you’ll be reading your ebooks “within” Kobo’s store.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a new path for Kobo. Here are side by side comparisons of the current App Store apps for Kobo and Kindle:

Again, green indicates the “store” section; again, Kobo claims the majority of the interface for itself, leaving you just one third of the screen to browse your own library.

I don’t know why Kobo keeps doing this, other than I suspect the company is aggressively trying to boost sales. By contrast, I imagine Amazon enjoys strong enough sales that it can afford to hand over the full interface to its customers. But I also suspect that Amazon intentionally keeps the private library and public store concepts separate in order to provide a more intimate experience for its customers.

With this and my last critique of Kobo, it’s starting to look like I really don’t like the eternal third place runner in the ebook retailer race. That’s not true! I just don’t like it when a business pushes too far into its customers’ personal spheres, and that line is very easy to cross when we’re in the digital world. No matter how “e” publishing becomes, a quality reading experience is still essentially a private experience — a silent connection between the reader and the author that takes place in the inner world of the mind. I wish Kobo would take that concept more seriously.

First, the good news…

Like Hulu, Next Issue Media is owned by several big media companies, and at launch they’ve made nearly three dozen titles available. The service’s pricing plans are simple: $10 a month for access to 27 monthly titles, or $15 a month for those plus 5 more weekly titles. Paying $120 to $180 a year for virtual magazine subscriptions isn’t a trivial matter, but the more magazines you like to read regularly, the better the deal gets; you’d pay about the same for individual print subscriptions to just the five weekly titles.

And now for the bad news!

Before you get too excited, there are of course some big problems, both in usability and consumer rights.

1. If you own an iPad, Kindle Fire, or Nook, you can’t subscribe. The Next Issue app is only available for Android tablets running Honeycomb or higher, although an iOS version is supposedly in the works.
2. It’s only being offered to U.S. customers.
3. The Terms of Service you’re forced to accept wholesale are abusive. This is the case with pretty much every sort of consumer offering these days, but that doesn’t make it ethical or fair. In Next Media’s case, the two biggest problems are:
   • Mandatory binding arbitration, meaning you waive your rights to sue even if the company does something egregious with the service or with your personal information.
   • Lifetime download limits for every issue: no more than 5 devices, and no more than 10 times total.
4. In addition, I can’t find any information about how long you can keep old issues, or whether you have access to them if you end the plan. (The only information I found on this topic said that Next Media reserves the right to remove any content at any time without warning.) This more or less aligns with the Netflix approach — consumers don’t expect to be able to save permanent copies of the movies they stream on Netflix — but it’s not traditionally how magazine subscriptions have worked, so make sure you understand this and you’re okay with it before signing up.
5. As you might expect from a magazine company, the privacy policy notes that they’ll use your personal information and activity with the service for advertising purposes. You can request that they remove your information from their system by contacting them at the email address in their Privacy Policy.

Next Media’s executives told All Things D that everything about this venture is an experiment at this point, so everything from the plan pricing to the platform availability may change by the time I publish this post. (However, based on current U.S. business practices, I have no reason to believe the fine print will get any better.) Still, as a former magazine addict who has been consistently disappointed by the digital magazine space, I think this is exciting news.

The real test, however, will be whether or not Next Media can reach all those iPad owners. If Apple okays the Next Media app later this year, it could prove to be a far better alternative to magazines than either Apple’s own Newsstand or the fairly expensive Zinio service.

• Murasaki ← this one has the comparison chart
• BookReader
• Bookle

I’m happy to see some new EPUB solutions hitting the marketplace. If you use a Mac, you probably already know that EPUB readers have been scarce around these parts. Sure, there’s the EPUBReader plugin if you use Firefox, but Chrome and Safari don’t have anything as good. There’s also the built-in reader from Calibre, but it is only a reader of last resort. Otherwise you’re stuck with overbuilt solutions like Adobe Digital Editions or B&N’s Nook app (which requires a B&N account even if you’re just using it for personal EPUB files).

I’ve tried two of these new apps, and in my opinion they’re not bringing enough quality to warrant a purchase price just yet. But at least they’re trying! The first app that can offer deep customization, broad EPUB compatibility, and sophisticated annotation tools will find itself at the head of a pretty empty market segment, so there’s still plenty of room for improvement in the coming months. For now, this is a great start.

The big change is that the primary display area on the home screen will be dedicated to your books, instead of sample excerpts the Kobobot thinks you might enjoy.

All in all, I like it, and not simply because Kobo played a nice PR game by contacting me after reading my critique. It actually does resolve my biggest criticism by restoring some primary functionality. What do you think?

I’ve been trying to come up with a good way to describe the newly released Longform app for iPad. It’s a digital magazine on steroids. It’s an infinite magazine, a magazine multiplex. It’s a portable reading room where new issues arrive daily. It’s an evolving anthology of nonfiction journalism.

The point is, it’s awesome. If you have an iPad and you prefer longer, more substantial articles over 350-word pieces, you’ll love it.

Longform has been around a while and is one of several good reading services, but it’s never been part of my weekly routine. I’ve always got a backlist of things to read that I save through Readability and shoot to my Kindle each morning, and that keeps me occupied on the subway.

But when it comes to the iPad, which I tend to use mostly at home, I’m frequently left wanting for high quality reading material. I haven’t encountered a digital magazine yet that isn’t a waste of my time and my device’s onboard memory. All the RSS and social media aggregators–apps like Pulse, Flipboard, Feedly, and Zite–can be a lot of fun, but aside from focusing on shallower content they all suffer from the Filter Bubble. Even Google News hides potentially interesting articles if I’m logged into my Google account when I visit.

Bypassing your filter bubble is one of the things Longform excels at. Like the better general interest print magazines, when you browse Longform’s selection of articles you’re positioning yourself for serendipitous discovery. Longform’s co-founder Max Linsky points out another way the filter bubble can fail you:

“One of the things I realized after spending two years reading a really insane amount of this stuff is that after you read an incredible 5,000-word story about warlords in Afghanistan, you don’t really want to dive into another 5,000-word story about warlords in Afghanistan.”

The second thing Longform excels at is reach: along with offline access to your Readability list (Readability still lacks its own native iOS app), Longform provides a well-designed, clutter-free access point to around two dozen sources, both print and online, that are known for producing high quality writing, like The Atlantic, NY Review of Books, The Awl, and n+1.

You can switch from web view to a customizable reading view that removes distractions.

The drawbacks? It’s not free. It’s iPad only. That list of two dozen sources starts to look pretty small once you get past the honeymoon phase.

But these are small complaints. There’s no way around the $5 cost, but it’s about what you’d pay for one issue of one magazine from a newsstand, and Longform will provide far more hours of quality reading. The Readability integration means you can add articles from all over the web, so you’re not restricted to Longform’s suggested sources. As for the iPad limitation, I just hope there are Android and smartphone versions in the works, so that everyone with a tablet device can soon enjoy it.

(Note: If you don’t want to spend the $5, or you need something that works with an iPhone or iPod Touch, or you want blog and social network feeds mixed in with the longform writing, try the free Flipboard app instead.)

I no longer enjoy launching the Kobo app on my iPhone or iPad. I stopped looking forward to interacting with it a few updates ago, and now I actually avoid it.

This has been building for a while. A year ago, I praised Kobo for being ahead of the curve when it came to adding entertaining new features to its iPad app (the features were later extended to other platforms). “Best app,” I wrote then, and I meant it. But over the past six months—well, ever since Apple crippled all the competing ebook retailers’ apps for strategic reasons in the summer of 2011—Kobo has been adding new features to make its app more and more “social” and “networked” and “fun”, with the consequence that the app has started to become less and less enjoyable to use. The latest upgrade (version 5.3) has simply made it not worth bothering with anymore.

All upsell, all the time

The new home screen for the Kobo app

(I don’t even want to talk about the fact that, because the last book I’d opened in the app before this update was erotica, now Kobo thinks that ALL I WANT TO SEE are self-published Smashwords-style M/M book covers with titles like “Marked Men” and “Temptation Castle”. That’s my fault for opening books in an app that clearly intends to track everything I do for all time. It’s embarrassing, I guess, but it’s not even what I’m upset about.)

There is a time and place for book ads, and it is: WHEN I HAVE CHOSEN TO SHOP FOR A NEW BOOK. Guess when I haven’t chosen to do that? When I launch the Kobo app for the sole purpose of reading a book I already own.

Again, my complaint put in even simpler terms: The Kobo app is was designed to let me read my ebooks. It is was not a catalog I launch to browse for new purchases.

One more time, in visual form, in case someone at Kobo sees this rant but is pretending to be too busy to read it:

Look at the screencap above again. Jeez. The new recommendations section takes up HALF of the display area now. Your own books–the ones you’ve added to the Kobo app so that you can read them (in many cases, you even paid good money for them)–are swept aside into a secondary section, reduced to one cover image (unless that slot is filled by a sample you recently opened, sigh) and a four-pane mini-thumbnail collage that together take up only one-third of the display area.

Imagine if the next time Apple updated its iOS for your iPhone it replaced half of your home screen with “trial apps” that you didn’t ask for. You’d think Apple was insane, or maybe had turned into a U.S. cellular carrier circa 2007. In fact, Apple does look at your past purchases (if you give permission) and offers up recommendations. But it does this within its App Store, so that you, the customer, have to deliberately choose to look at the list when you’re good and ready–the digital equivalent of walking into a store to browse the merchandise.

Try to buy this book, we dare ya

So that’s the first problem, and it’s a big enough “screw you” to customers to make me worry that Kobo now suffers from what I call Tivo-itis, which is when all the smart people who made a company visionary leave and are replaced by second- and third-stringers.

But the second problem with the new Kobo update is that this new “recommendation” advertising doesn’t even work. Here’s what it’s like to reach the end of a sample book.

Remember when I mentioned that Apple had zombified all competing ebook apps? Those competitors, including Kobo, have to hand over 30% of their profits if they want to include crazy cutting-edge things like links to their own websites. This means Kobo, Nook, and Kindle have all been forced to offer dumbed down apps that can display files, but that can’t enable any sort of shopping experience.

Kobo still has to follow this rule, even with “free sample” books. The result is what you see above: If you do tap on one of their recommended titles, what you’ll end up with is a “free sample” that just stops at the end of the sample. There’s no message. Nothing. Not a quick “End of sample!”, and certainly not a “Buy this book on Kobo’s website!” because Apple would reject that functionality in a microsecond. Just a blank screen, and an error message if you try to turn the page. It’s true you can “share” the name of the book via email or social media, but let’s look at how you can do this.

So technically, if you really want to sell yourself the ebook sample, by emailing it to yourself you can then get an email with a link to the book on the Kobo website, and from your email message click through to buy the book. Wow. It looks as stupid illustrated here as it felt doing it.

[Update: A Kobo representative has told me that if your Kobo account is set up to permit email communication, you actually receive this email automatically the first time you open a sample within the app. It turns out I had this option unchecked, which is why I ended up having to figure out the manual way to do it.]

The other ebook retailers have similar problems with samples–for example, Kindle samples offer “buy this book” links that simply don’t work. The difference is, because the customer has pre-selected a Kindle sample, the non-functioning link serves as a reminder that the title can be purchased from Amazon. On Kobo’s app, the experience is more like, “Here’s a bunch of context-free excerpts from books you probably don’t care about. Good luck with that.”

Part of me wonders if this is the first sign of the New Face of Kobo, now that it’s been bought up by Rakuten. Software updates don’t happen overnight, so this was likely something Kobo had in the works for a while. Rakuten surely had enough time to kill this update but chose to release it anyway, which is a good sign that this is the way things will work with Kobo from now on. Who knows? By the time summer comes around the Kobo iOS app may be nothing but an impenetrable billboard of book samples, Facebook alerts, infographics, help screens, pop-up windows, slide-out sheets, and “share this” badges. (I haven’t even discussed the increasingly overstuffed social sharing features, but if you haven’t experienced them for yourself, just imagine how cool it would be to combine an ebook app with the slot floor of a casino.) Good times.

What Kobo should have been working on the past six months was a decent web app alternative so that it could escape Apple’s ridiculous iron fist. Then it could reinstate the original web catalog that it used to have, which was both useful and non-intrusive.

What Kobo has been doing instead is steadily ruining the customer experience for some of its best customers–the ones it already has.

(Photo: jot.punkt)

Too many restrictions

About a week ago, a study about ebook buying and reading habits reported that teens find current ebook platforms too limited when it comes to social sharing:

The E-Book Market for 13- to 17-Year-Olds

• Teens lag behind all other age groups in e-book adoption. Sixty-six percent of 13- to 17-year olds say they prefer print books to e-books, 26 percent say they have no preference and only 8 percent prefer e-books.
• One reason for this resistance: Teens like using social technology to discuss and share things with their friends, and e-books at this point are not a social technology. An increasing number of teens surveyed says there are too many restrictions on using e-books: 14 percent said so in 2011, compared to 6 percent in 2010.

That’s been my overall takeaway, too, while test-driving these various social reading apps recently. There are just too many restrictions to make the experience enjoyable.

But “too many restrictions” is a pretty general complaint. What about some details? Okay, here are two fatal flaws I see in the social reading experience right now:

1. The ebook landscape is too fragmented.

From retailers to technology companies to publishers, every company involved in ebooks today is spending a massive amount of resources trying to simultaneously lock in customers, block competition, and thwart piracy. None of these goals serves the needs of the customer. In fact, progress in any of them makes it increasingly harder for an individual to use his ebooks freely.

2. DRM ruins everything.

I know, it’s always so easy to bash DRM, and how else will you prevent customers from making copies etc? But when it comes to social media, DRM truly is a lethal additive. Social sharing requires a frictionless environment to work–think Instagram or Pinterest–and DRM is almost pure friction.

Imagine the ghostland that Instagram would have become if you had to authorize and unlock each photo, then sideload it into the Instagram app before uploading.

See the restrictions in action

My favorite social reading app of the moment is Subtext, and yet unless those two issues are resolved soon, I fear Subtext is a non-starter, along with every other social reading attempt currently being tested or developed.

Why? Because right now, to use Subtext you have to:

1. Own an iPad.
2. Buy your ebooks from an exclusive subset of retailers such as Kobo and Google Books.

Let’s look at the fragmentation problem: You can’t use Subtext on your smartphone or on an Android tablet. You can’t use Kindle or iBooks or Nook or library ebooks with it. You can’t even review your notes and highlights on the web, for instance from a regular computer or laptop. And about that pesky DRM: If you do buy ebooks that work with Subtext, they won’t work on any Kindle devices or apps, and your notes won’t carry over to Kobo or Nook or Overdrive.

Why would a teenager go through so many hoops, and deal with such an unnecessarily hamstrung “solution” just to talk to her friends about a book? For that matter, why would an adult? Why would anyone? Life’s too short for that sort of nonsense.

I still think social reading apps point out an interesting future for, say, book clubs and classrooms, but until the industry kills DRM for good and stops trying to carve up exclusive little corporate fiefdoms, it’s going to be too much trouble to bother with.

(Photo: niallkennedy)

I’m not going to comment on the software, as I’m still downloading it as I type this entry. And other sites are doing a great job of covering today’s Apple press conference, so I’m not going to give Apple more free PR if I can help it. I mean, unless they want to pay me.

But I would like to point out one important catch. The fancy new textbook authoring software that Apple is giving away, iBooks Author, comes with a big restriction in its license agreement, and it’s that you can only sell your textbook in Apple’s iBooks store. (Click image for full-size screenshot of the license from the App Store page.) If you want to give your new textbook away for free, Apple has no problem with that. But if you want to sell it yourself or use some other retailer, no dice. You go through iBooks, meaning through Apple, and you give Apple a cut of the profits. Or you don’t use iBooks Author to make your fancy new digital textbook.

That, of course, is why iBooks Author is free. It’s sort of like if the company started giving away Pages, but required that all novels typed with the app belonged to the Apple Store.

So download it, play with it, learn from it. But take a good look at the terms before you invest any real labor in using it, because whatever you end up producing is going to be under Apple’s control for a long, long time.

Update: Forget all of this! Stanza delivered a surprise update to the Apple app store on November 10th, 2011, that restored functionality on iOS 5. But only update if you need to: this latest version breaks the app if you’re running an older iOS like 4.3 (thanks to Paula for pointing that out in the comments below.)

Lexcycle’s Stanza, the once mighty ebook reader app for iOS devices, doesn’t work on Apple’s latest mobile operating system iOS 5, and as development and maintenance on the app appears to have stopped, it likely never will.

Eulogy

Stanza was my first and most favorite ebook app for the iPhone, and later the iPad. When it was first launched, it had better features than any competing third party app, and over time it consistently beat the big players like Amazon, Kobo and Barnes & Noble on things like openness and customization. I loved Stanza for subway rides—I used a giant font size in landscape view and was able to flick through screens like index cards, which made it easy to keep my place while being jostled and interrupted constantly.

For a while, Stanza was my catch-all app for ebook files, and it let me standardize my library around the EPUB format despite Amazon’s anti-user push for azw/mobi and tpz. Whether it was a title I’d downloaded from an author’s website, or a classic I’d grabbed off of Project Gutenberg, Stanza could handle it. I stopped caring that Amazon and Barnes & Noble were taking baby steps with their branded apps, because the scrappy alternative was far better. Worst case scenario, I could always remove the DRM on books from those retailers and shift them over to Stanza.

But best of all was how Stanza worked with my Calibre ebook library. I exported my entire Calibre library using OPDS and uploaded it to a private server, then connected to it from Stanza over the Internet. I was able to browse my library—and instantly download titles to my app—from anywhere I could get a wireless connection.

I always knew that Stanza would eventually go away after Amazon acquired it back in 2009. Frankly, I was pleasantly surprised the retailer kept Stanza available for as long as it did, although I suspect Amazon’s motive was purely strategic: it prevented Apple, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo from acquiring what was for a while the iOS platform’s most famous and popular ebook app, while at the same time it gave Amazon a way to indirectly offer an EPUB reader without having to sully the Kindle brand.

I suppose, if you want to live in denial, you can imagine there’s a slim chance Stanza will wake up from its comatose state one day and start working again. But it’s time to move on. From the day Amazon purchased Stanza, we knew in our hearts that it wouldn’t last forever.

We, the survivors

If you’re a Stanza user on an iOS device, what’s next for you? Here are some quick tips:

Getting your files back from a broken Stanza

The simplest strategy is to not upgrade to iOS 5 if you can help it, although by doing so you’ll miss out on some really nice features that Apple has introduced, like system-wide text expander shortcuts, an elegant (but extremely limited) to-do app, and the ability to update and sync your device over Wi-Fi.

If you updated your device already, and you have ebook files in your Stanza app that you really want to salvage before moving on, you can try using the Stanza Book Restore tool that Lexcycle created. It’s a Java app that will scan your most recent iTunes backup, find the Stanza files that were saved there, and extract them as files with human-readable names.

Finding a decent alternative

Based on the suggestions in this Get Satisfaction thread on Stanza’s iOS 5 issues and this Mobileread wiki page on ebook software, I tried a few other apps to see if I could find one that would work with my private OPDS library and provide some decent functionality. Here are my observations.

Best premium bet: MegaReader ($1.99 at time of post)

Pros:
• handles OPDS catalogs nicely
• good basic customization options
• some great built in catalogs, so if you just want to find a good book to read fast (from a public domain collection, naturally), you can do that within seconds of launching this app

Cons:
• doesn’t handle some basic font styles like bold or italic
• no way to take notes or look up words
• limited layout options (what is has are nice, but there aren’t many)

Based on the suggestions users are making on the app’s user forums, there are some other missing features that could limit its usefulness to some users: there’s no way to drag and drop files into it using iTunes, and it can’t handle really large (1000+ titles) libraries.

I’ve been using it for a few days, and I’ve found that for basic reading and public domain book discovery, I’m pretty happy with it. However, if I’m doing a closer reading of a book—which often includes taking notes, highlighting passages, making lots of bookmarks, and looking up unfamiliar words—I much prefer to use iBooks or the Kindle app.

Best free bet: iBooks

Pros:
• free
• simple but elegant UI
• handles PDF files as well

Cons:
• not many customization features
• no access to catalogs–only the terrible iBooks Store, which you should avoid at all cost unless you like having your ebooks locked to iOS devices and nothing else (not Mac desktops)
• I’ve had trouble with the app running sluggishly if I add a lot of notes and highlights to a text.

To get EPUB files from other online catalogs into iBooks, you’ll have to access them from Mobile Safari, then choose iBooks when you download the file. Alternately, you can drag-and-drop non-DRMed files into the Books section of iTunes and sync that way. Fine, it’s not a great solution, but it’s free.

Not recommended (except perhaps for public library checkouts):

Bluefire is more or less useless to me. Its choice of catalogs is paltry and locked down, meaning you can’t add your own, and its key functionality—the ability to read titles locked to your Adobe Digital Editions account—is duplicated in other apps. You can annotate your books, but you can’t export any notes, which makes the feature rather pointless.

Overdrive is only good for accessing library ebooks and audiobooks, and it doesn’t offer basics like layout options, the ability to annotate, or a dictionary. If you use the Kindle app, and your library has the title in the Kindle format, you’ll find it’s a much better option—Amazon will back up your notes so you can access them later, and you can take advantage of the Kindle platform’s bookmark syncing.

(Image credits: casket, wickenden; frame, John Loo)