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.)

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 clicked through to the settings screen and was presented with this new (well, new to me) set of options.

I think it’s terrific. I’ve been a big proponent of eReaderIQ for a while now, because it’s an effortless way for the average consumer to find Kindle deals. (For a similar service for iOS, try AppShopper.) Unfortunately, eReaderIQ’s daily email has been losing its utility lately as more and more ebooks flood the Amazon store—the amount of chaff makes it harder than ever to find the occasional grain of wheat.

This morning, I opened my eReaderIQ email and smiled. It’s a lot cleaner and better organized, and a lot easier to see whether there’s anything worth grabbing.

(Photo: peterjroberts)

Whether such cases are due to idiocy or deliberate copyfraud, they hurt the consumer. It’s prohibitively expensive for the average private citizen to have to engage the Library of Congress as well as hire a copyright attorney (which, no kidding, is what the Copyright Office recommends) just to confirm that he has the right to do what he wants with something published in 1925. Even then, if the work was first published outside the U.S. then it may be nearly impossible to determine its true copyright status.

Which leads me to the problem of locked PDF versions of century-old works. I’m now in the possession of half a dozen PDFs of old short stories that various websites offer for free, and yet those files have been password protected to prevent me from printing, copying, or otherwise gaining direct access to the text. In the most extreme cases, the person who created the PDF file has, for reasons known only to him and the functionally retarded demon who guides him, added his own copyright claim to it. Seriously, people should just be hit with sticks sometimes.

Remove that PDF’s sham DRM with MuPDF!

(That may be the worst subheading ever written.)

Fortunately, Robert Brewer at Excited Curiosity explains that you can use a free open source PDF toolkit called MuPDF to unlock password protected PDF files. There are MuPDF viewers for Windows and Linux at MuPDF.com, but For OS X you have to use the command line (i.e., the Terminal app found under Applications>Utilities). Everything that follows is for OS X users.

First download the OS X binary from mupdf.com, unarchive it, and put the resulting folder wherever you like. Then in Terminal, use the “cd” command to navigate to that folder, and then run the “pdfclean” command on a locked file and in seconds, you’ll have a new unlocked version. Here’s an example of how to run the command if you have the MuPDF folder in your home directory and the locked PDF file on your Desktop:

./pdfclean ../Desktop/lockedfile.pdf ../Desktop/newnameforfile.pdf

If you’re not used to Terminal, here’s a quick introduction that will teach you the basics. Pretty much all you need to know to use MuPDF is how to type the full paths of the MuPDF folder and of the locked PDF file, and the command “cd” to change directories. (The command “ls” to list the contents of your current directory is also helpful.) You can also check out this comment on Brewer’s blog for more help.

Using OS X? Here’s a contextual menu shortcut for MuPDF

I was excited about finding this free solution to the bogus DRM problem, but I wanted an easier way to use it in the future without having to launch Terminal each time. I created a simple workflow service in Automator that I can access via the contextual menu when I click on a file. Now when I download a PDF and find that it’s locked, I simply right-click the document and select “UnlockPDF” from my Services menu, and a clean version appears next to the original.

Here’s the code I used to create the service. Note that I wrote this using Automator 2.2.1; when I shared a similar tip last year for KindleGen, I discovered that some readers couldn’t replicate my instructions because they were using older versions.

on basename(thePath)
	if thePath ends with "/" then
		set nameIndex to -2
	else
		set nameIndex to -1
	end if
	set ASTID to AppleScript's text item delimiters
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "/"
	set thePath to text item nameIndex of thePath
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ASTID
	return thePath
end basename

on getdir(theFileName)
	set theReversedFileName to (reverse of (characters of theFileName)) as string
	set theOffset to offset of "/" in theReversedFileName
	set thePrefix to (reverse of (characters (theOffset + 1) thru -1 of theReversedFileName)) as string
	set theSuffix to (reverse of (characters 1 thru (theOffset - 1) of theReversedFileName)) as string
	return thePrefix
end getdir

on run {input, parameters}
	set myFile to quoted form of POSIX path of input
	set newFile to basename(POSIX path of input)
	set newPath to getdir(POSIX path of input)
	set finalPath to (newPath & "/u-" & newFile)
	try
		do shell script "../../Applications/mupdf-0.7-darwin-i386/pdfclean" & " " & myFile & " " & finalPath
	end try
	return input
end run

Quick instructions:

1. Launch Automator and create a new Service workflow.
2. At the top of the composition area, change “Service receives selected [dropdown]” to either “files or folders”, “folders”, or “PDF files”. Change the other dropdown to “Finder”.
3. In the Library pane on the left, click the Utilities directory, then find the “Run Applescript” action and drag it into the composition area.
4. Select all the default code in the “Run Applescript” box and delete it.
5. Paste the above code in. Be sure to edit the path to the MuPDF folder so that it’s correct for your situation.
6. Click the hammer icon to compile the code.
7. Save the service under whatever name you like. I chose “UnlockPDF” to make it easy to find months from now when I’ve forgotten all about how I did this.

Because I’m a pretty bad scripter, I’m sure this isn’t the most elegant way to do this. If you can improve on it—particularly if you can fix it so that it can batch process an entire folder of PDF files—please let me know and I’ll update the script.

(Frozen book illustration credits: Ice Block, Risager; Old Book, HoskingIndustries)

This is probably a good time to remind you of a competitor, Kinstant, that offers a similar service. Kinstant’s page—also displayed via the browser—offers links as well as weather. The weather portion is nowhere near as fancy as what Kindle Weather Station offers, but on the other hand you can add your own custom links and access dozens of commonly used websites. Based simply on sheer value offered, I’d currently recommend Kinstant over Kindle Weather Station.

And finally, Kindle Weather Station also offers a free way to access the service from your Kindle’s home screen. Instead of opening up the browser and selecting a bookmark, you can download the sample of a special ebook from Amazon that will let you jump straight over to the Kindle Weather Station service in the browser. While this counts as a solution, you should know that it’s ridiculously easy to create a “Quick Links” document that you can customize as much as you want, and that can include as many bookmarks as you like instead of just one.

The website Mac OS X Automation reported it first, so far as I know. From that site:

Mac OS X Lion includes an Automator action, named Text to EPUB File, that is designed to make it very easy to convert selected text or text documents into EPUB books, ideal for transferring to iPads and iPhones. Additionally, the created EPUB books can include images, MPEG audio, or MPEG video files.

NOTE: If the source documents for the action are in Rich Text Format (RTF), any formatting they possess will be preserved, and display correctly in the EPUB document. Also, the action includes full Unicode support, so Asian and Arabic characters are preserved as well.

By default, there’s no way to access this Automator action from any apps because there aren’t any default Services written to take advantage of it. But the website above provides four Service scripts that you can use to give your copy of Lion super EPUB creation powers over groups of files, text selections, or content copied to the Clipboard.

The site also offers some tutorials on how to install the Services and how to use them, if you’re curious but not sure how to get started.

“Text to EPUB File” [Max OS X Automation] ]]> http://booksprung.com/apples-os-x-lion-can-create-epub-files/feed 0 http://booksprung.com/readbeam-makes-it-easy-to-read-newspapers-and-blogs-on-your-ereader http://booksprung.com/readbeam-makes-it-easy-to-read-newspapers-and-blogs-on-your-ereader#comments Mon, 18 Jul 2011 17:48:54 +0000 Chris Walters http://booksprung.com/?p=6832 If you don’t want to use Calibre, or can’t be bothered to figure out how to use it to subscribe to news feeds and send them to your ereader, you might want to give ReadBeam a try. The service offers around two dozen popular blogs and online newspapers. You’ll have to sign up with a working email address, and then the site will send your selected news feeds daily.

If you use a Kindle, you can either authorize ReadBeam to send content directly to your device’s email address, or you can leave it blank and you’ll receive the Kindle-friendly .mobi files directly, which you can then copy over. They don’t always work (the International Herald Tribune was unreadable for me, for example), but hey, it’s not like it has to cost you anything to try it out.

The service is free for now, but on the ReadBeam blog there’s a post from last April that suggests the developer has considered offering some sort of freemium service to let you subscribe to feeds outside the default set. Or you can do it yourself on Calibre, of course.

Gnod’s literature section, Gnooks, includes a free service it calls a Literature Map: simply type in the name of an author who interests you, and Gnod will stop running human extinction scenarios long enough to return a nifty floating cloud of names. The closer two names are to each other, the more similar the authors are, and their proximity to your initial author indicates how closely they match his or her style.

Above is my test for sci-fi author Charles Stross. In my experience, Doctorow’s voice is nothing like Stross’, but I’m not a computer so I’m probably wrong.

Here’s one for Cynthia Ozick, who you may have noticed by now is one of my go-to names when I want to test something with a semi-obscure but highly respected living author:

And here’s another one for Charlie Huston:

Okay, so they’re not going to win any awards for visual design, but robots don’t need eyes. None of us will after the singularity, but that’s a downer of a note to end this post on, so let me close with the word “balloons.”

Update: If you want a more intimate recommendation—meaning just one author’s name instead of a cloud—you can try Gnod’s Suggestions page, where you enter the names of three authors and (hopefully) get back a fourth.

You’ll have to install a free add-on to Firefox, and then whenever you want to send an article to your Kindle, you just click a button in the browser. Here’s a fancy-schmancy video (it’s got violin music!) to explain more, if you’re still confused.

As with any service like this, before it will work properly you’ll have to log in to your Amazon Kindle account management page and add Readability as an authorized sender, but the add-on does a good job of walking you through this the first time you use it.

Although the Kindle feature is free, for $5 a month you can queue up your articles Instapaper-style and have them automatically delivered to your Kindle as a single document every morning. It’s not a bad price if you want a simple, set-it-and-forget it solution, but remember that there are free Instapaper solutions that require only slightly more effort (be sure to read the first comment on that post too).

Finally, if you’re a blogger and want to add Readability’s “Send to Kindle” functionality directly to your posts, there’s a button for that. You can test it out on this post by clicking the button below: