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.

Hmm, this does not bode well for my goals.

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.

It's easy and fun to find out more about a Kobo sample... if you're on amphetamines.

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.

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)

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:

Their “One Trillion Minute Challenge”, which launched last week, is designed to turn your daily reading efforts into something vaguely rewarding for some organization nearby. I’m not kidding about the vague part; I can’t find any sort of fine print that explains exactly how Kobo intends to choose what awards to give to which charities, but here’s the gist of it from the press release:

For every 10 million-minutes read, Kobo will make a contribution of eReading valued between $1,000 and $20,000 to a recipient chosen through the Read On program. Recipients will receive Read On kits including eReaders, eBooks, and the materials needed to start digital reading programs in their community. Kobo is contributing the first million dollars and will work to enlist additional partners inspired by this innovative new program.

In an article for the National Post, Kobo’s CEO Michael Serbinis gives a little more info:

The Read On program is international and Serbinis said Kobo will work to ensure that not all the donation packages end up in one area. But, banding together to support one cause could help your chances, he said, adding that if a large portion of the overall minutes-read comes from a group supporting one cause, that would be a factor in their decision.

Basically, you sign up, nominate a charity candidate, then start reading ebooks using one of Kobo’s Reading Life ebook apps. Your reading time will be logged by the app and reported back to Kobo.

This is just the latest in Kobo’s strategy to incorporate game mechanics into everyday reading. When it comes to gamification, Kobo has been way ahead of every other bookseller or device maker in 2011. I wrote earlier this year that I thought Kobo’s Reading Life ebook app for the iPad was the best ebook app I’d ever seen, and since then it’s been extended to other Apple devices as well as Android devices. The major appeal of Reading Life is the more you read, the more badges you earn, which sounds useless (it is) but is also oddly satisfying. Other more practical features include streamlined ways to share passages on Facebook and Twitter, and a dashboard of stats and charts to measure your reading habits.

This trillion minute challenge may or may not pan out as Kobo has described it, but if you enjoy reading towards a specific goal, it’s an easy option.

Now there’s Delivereads, a free service that goes one step further by picking out the articles for you, then emailing them directly to your free.kindle.com email address.

Delivereads is a lot like (yes, more links are coming up) the websites longreads.com and longform.org, which both curate worthwhile articles and essays for you. But you still browse for articles at those sites and then choose which ones to email, whereas Delivereads automates everything after the initial sign up.

Whether you like what Delivereads sends will depend on whether you like founder Dave Pell’s taste in articles. He’s listed some of his recent picks on the Delivereads sign up page.

Jenn Northington at Shelf Awareness posted Monday about a couple of informal surveys she gave in January and earlier this month. In both instances, the respondents were self-selected and the total responses were just over 200, which I think translates into a margin of error of +/- everything. Still, since the surveys went out to Jenn’s Twitter and Tumblr followers only a few months apart, I’m going to assume that many of them took both surveys — and therefore that I can at least guess at how this small group’s attitudes and behaviors are evolving.

Whew! My point behind all of this set-up is that I love to sniff out early signs of how attitudes shift, and while this may only apply to Jenn’s followers, it makes me slightly more optimistic.

The survey only had four questions:

1. Where do you get your ebooks?
2. What devices do you use to read your ebooks?
3. What’s your single most favorite thing about ereading?
4. What’s your single least favorite thing about ereading?

To sum up the answers, the Kindle is still the leader, library ebooks grew in popularity, and if the same people answered both surveys then they’re shopping from and reading on more platforms now than just a few months ago. They’re also pirating more.

But the most dramatic shift in responses was in the “what’s your least favorite thing” category. In January, only 11% answered DRM, but that number jumped to 18% in April. It still lags behind other answers — loss of device and formatting/features are bigger concerns, apparently — but it jumped the most.

What I hope is that this means that the more you read ebooks, and especially the more you read them on multiple devices, the less patience you have for restrictions on what you can do with your ebooks. “Buy once, read everywhere” makes for nice Amazon marketing copy, but I think it also sums up what consumers expect from their ebooks regardless of which store they buy from, especially now that prices are roughly the same across all stores.

DRM works best if you can hide it from customers, but as ebooks grow in popularity the high cost of DRM will only grow more visible to readers. That’s even more likely as long as publishers keep using DRM to ruin lending.

Jenn also asked the respondents to define DRM in their own words, and she shared the results on a public Google spreadsheet. Click the “define DRM” button at the bottom to read the answers. It’s fascinating to see that in addition to the standard “DRM annoys me” and “DRM is a necessary evil” attitudes, there’s still a large swath of people who remain ignorant about the topic, even though they’ve heard of it before or know that it somehow affects them.

(Locks image: DaveBleasdale)

When Huckstep got his new Kindle earlier this year, he decided to automate the process of moving articles over to his device. His solution uses a modified version of Readability’s javascript; when you click the bookmarklet, it tells a server grab the text from the URL you’re visiting, clean it and convert it, then email it to your Kindle’s email address.

This is the fourth tool like this that I’ve seen in 2011, so you’ve got several options now if you want to experiment. One neat thing about this one is Huckstep has placed the code for Kindlebility on GitHub, so if you’d rather have a private version on your own server you can grab it and start hacking away.

Here are all four of these services, in case you want to compare them:

RELATED:
“Two more ways to get websites onto your Kindle”

If you want to go into the weekend with an inspirational story, check out Worldreader’s recent blog updates about the 440 free Kindles and M-Edge cases it just handed out to kids in Ghana, Africa. From the blog:

“After playing around with the buttons a bit, [the students] quickly understood the e-reader’s functionalities. They were disciplined and eager to learn. It was especially fascinating listening to the kids read local stories… It was wonderful to witness the students personalize their e-reader cases… This was a huge deal: suddenly the e-reader moved from being ‘someone else’s’ to ‘mine.’”

The Kindle blog Me and My Kindle, which alerted me to the story yesterday, also points out a great set of photos of the event over on Worldreader’s Flickr page.

Worldreader got some press earlier this year when it reported on a smaller trial run meant to test the logistics of the idea, and announced this bigger plan.

As noted in both the Wall Street Journal article and the blog quote above, one side benefit of the program is that its “local author” component has helped convert more books by Ghanaians into ebook format. Now here’s hoping someone tells the kids about Calibre and its ability to format-shift…

Worldreader.org

(Photo: Worldreader)

Their children’s book list has 89 suggestions, while the teen list has 44. You can visit the site to see them all, where they’re arranged in subcategories like “historical fiction” and “arts” to make browsing easier.

When it comes to ebook editions, a lot of the children’s picks are picture books and therefore aren’t available on the Kindle. Here are six titles I found on the list that are, along with six Kindle titles from the teen list.

(Note: several of the titles on the two lists are priced above $9.99 on the Kindle store. Remember, if you want to track Kindle titles so you can wait until the price comes down, eReaderIQ.com is free and easy to use.)

Kirkus 2010 Best Children’s Books

Selected Kindle-friendly titles — see the full list here

“Zora and Me”
by Victoria Bond and T. R. Simon
 
Kirkus review

“Crunch”
by Leslie Connor
 
Kirkus review

“Alchemy and Meggy Swann”
by Karen Cushman
 
Kirkus review

“Out of My Mind”
by Sharon M. Draper
 
Kirkus Review

“The Fantastic Secret Life of Owen Jester”
by Barbara O’Connor
 
Kirkus review

“The Water Seeker”
by Kimberly Willis Holt
 
Kirkus review

Kirkus 2010 Best Teen Books

Selected Kindle-friendly titles — see the full list here

“The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin”
by Josh Berk
 
Kirkus review

“White Cat”
by Holly Black and Michael Frost
 
Kirkus review

“Around the World in 100 Days”
by Gary Blackwood
 
Kirkus review

“Revolution”
by Jennifer Donnelly
 
Kirkus review

“Will Grayson, Will Grayson”
by John Green and David Levithan
 
Kirkus review

“Sweet, Hereafter”
by Angela Johnson and Chad Hunt
 
Kirkus review

“2010 Best Books for Children and Teens” [Kirkus Reviews] ]]> http://booksprung.com/kirkus-picks-best-teen-and-childrens-books-for-2010/feed 0 http://booksprung.com/use-instapaper-to-save-articles-to-your-kindle http://booksprung.com/use-instapaper-to-save-articles-to-your-kindle#comments Thu, 16 Sep 2010 22:19:32 +0000 Chris Walters http://booksprung.com/?p=2895

Calibre, the Kindle-friendly ebook library management program, will let you collect RSS feeds from various sources and get them on your Kindle through email or USB. The web service Kindlefeeder will do the same, and is maybe a little easier to use if you hate dealing with software.

But if you find yourself constantly stumbling across long text pieces online that you want to read later away from your computer, you might want to check out Instapaper. And if you’re carrying around a lightweight Kindle, why not start using it to read those pieces?

There are actually two free services–Instapaper and Read It Later–that let you save things in this way. You could accomplish nearly the same thing with browser bookmarks, but these services add a little extra functionality: they usually save just the text, not the surrounding framework of ads or menu options, and they provide a single destination where you can browse through and read all of things you’ve saved from all over the web.

But what’s most important is they give you the ability to route those saved pages to other devices, so you can read that long article later on your phone–or, yes, on your Kindle.

I think Instapaper does a better job at this, and it’s consequently the one I’m more familiar with, but you can use either service with only a little pre-planning.

Instapaper basics

There are two simple ways to add things you find online to your Instapaper list: by clicking the “Read Later” bookmarklet (best for content you find on websites or blogs), or via a private email address that’s automatically assigned to your account (best for copy-and-paste content). You can visit Instapaper and see your list of saved articles any time you want, or add your saved list to your RSS reader, or access it on a mobile phone, etc. But let’s look specifically at how to get to it on your Kindle.

An alternative: Read It Later

If you’re a Read It Later user, it’s not quite as convenient to load your saved articles directly onto your Kindle. On the other hand, Read It Later integrates nicely with Calibre’s RSS feed functionality, so if you’re already using Calibre with your Kindle you can route RIL into your existing feeds, then use Calibre to automatically send the articles to your device on a schedule.

(Photo: ShironekoEuro)