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)

“It will satisfy even the most voracious Harry Potter devotee, as well as engage new fans who’ve just discovered the books and/or movies. Even though we are vacationing in Hawaii and the beach beckons, Rachel and I spent hours going through each and every feature on the Web site. I felt almost as if we had somehow been transported inside the pages of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone itself.”

(The true sign of a book nerd—skipping the beach to stay indoors reading!)

I somehow managed to score an early invitation to Pottermore a couple of weeks ago when the Magic Quill contest was going on, which frankly amazes me because while I enjoyed the books I’m not really a fan. (I lucked out and happened to visit the site the day of the easiest question—the number of contestants in the Tri-Wizard Tournament—and then somehow got through to the registration page.) Sadly, though, I have yet to receive my activation code, because the site is letting us in in small waves over the next several weeks.

So as soon as I can get in, I’ll poke around, take screenshots, and report back. I’m fascinated by Rowling’s approach, because it takes so many of the elements that publishers are experimenting with in enhanced ebooks and places them next to the texts, instead of mixing them together. Series may have a built-in edge over single works of adult fiction, because of the rich and deep world that can develop over several volumes, so maybe this approach isn’t right for every book. But it will be interesting to see what works and what doesn’t, because I’m sure we’ll see plenty of Pottermore clones in the future. Personally, I’d love to see some sci-fi and fantasy authors try their hands at this sort of thing.

“The Magic of Pottermore” [Publishers Weekly]

The tl;dr summary: it’s only fast if it’s warmed up and working properly; there’s lots of older content and public domain stuff in the database but not enough frontlist material being offered; the search interface sucks; publishers (and Google) need to take metadata more seriously, because it’s crucial for discoverability in an increasingly crowded marketplace; and the machine’s profit centers are blank journals and small print runs for a local organization, plus self-publishing one-offs.

Be sure to grab a drink and some popcorn and read the comments after the article, too. There are a couple of inflexible traditionalists who loathe the Espresso and everything they think it stands for, and they pull out every bad comment thread/discussion forum trick in the book short of referencing Hitler.

“The Good, the Bad, and the Sexy: Our Espresso Book Machine Experience” [Scholarly Kitchen]
(Photo: sukisuki)

Today, however, they’re offering free access to their website for 24 hours. You have to register, but there’s no credit card info required, just name, address, and email. There’s also no verification process, so theoretically you can make up anything you want if you’d prefer to remain private.

You’ve probably already heard that Consumer Reports recently named the new Nook Simple Touch ereader the best of the 6″ models, beating out the Kindle 3 by one point (the scores were 78 and 77 respectively). But now you can see the full list, and see how everyone stacks up on a range of features and performance criteria.

Consumer Reports free access offer [via Consumerist]

Disclosure: I used to blog for Consumerist, which is owned by the parent organization that owns Consumer Reports. None of that past professional relationship has any bearing on this post, however.

Right now it’s in public beta, which means you can sign up and start adding books, but be prepared for rough spots. For instance, the first book I searched for—”Foreign Bodies” by Cynthia Ozick—wasn’t in their database, even though it’s the most recent book of hers and was published in 2010. The mobile apps the service promises on the home screen don’t seem to actually exist, at least not on iTunes or Amazon’s Android app store. I also had some trouble with the rating system, where my star rating didn’t appear to be captured properly on a couple of titles, and I couldn’t find a way to delete books from my shelves once I’d added them.

If you already have an established presence on Goodreads, Shelfari or LibraryThing, I’m not sure you’ll be that intrigued by what BookLikes has to offer right now. Amazon’s Shelfari is the strongest direct competitor—not only is Shelfari beta testing a similar recommendation system, but it’s clear that some of BookLikes’ main user interface elements were “borrowed” from Shelfari. On the other hand, the one thing BookLikes definitely offers that Shelfari can’t is independence from Amazon, at least at this early startup stage.

The dilemma of a site like this is that as long as there isn’t a large community of like-minded readers to help suggest books, there’s not much point in joining—but if nobody joins then there will never be that community. I’ll check back periodically to see whether it comes into its own as more users sign up. (I won’t be checking back periodically after all—see my update above for why.)

BookLikes

I finally got to test drive a Nook Touch yesterday, right after sitting in a coffee shop reading my Kindle 3 for an hour, and I have to admit I was instantly in love; I wanted to leave my Kindle 3 behind at Barnes & Noble and bring home a Nook Touch instead. Even anchored by a security cable, it felt lighter and easier to hold while reading.

But that was only a brief infatuation, and this morning I’m glad my Kindle is still with me. Because as much as I loved playing with the Nook Touch, I’m not willing to come on board until Barnes & Noble fine-tunes some issues with the device and its customer service.

Two notes before I begin:

• These won’t be dealbreakers for every consumer, but they’re real issues that you should be aware of.
• If you’re savvy with computers and/or consumer technology, the Nook Touch can be rooted and you can do all sorts of fun things with it, so some of the limitations below won’t apply to you.

1. There’s no way to email yourself documents or web pages

If you want to sideload personal documents or ebooks, you have to do it via USB cable while the Nook Touch is tethered to your PC, or load it onto a memory card and insert that into the Nook Touch.

By comparison, every Kindle is assigned an email address upon purchase, and you can email various documents to it from anywhere. Lots of third party developers have taken advantage of this to provide easy ways to send your Kindle web content, including Readability (my new favorite), Instapaper and Read It Later. You can also set up Calibre, the free ebook library manager, to email RSS feeds or ebooks to your Kindle.
 

2. The browser is hidden and may not be as functional as the Kindle browser

Although Amazon has always called it an “experimental” feature, every Kindle model so far has come with a web browser that you can access directly. The Kindle 3′s browser is in fact fairly advanced and does a great job at HTML rendering.

You can access the browser from a Nook Touch, but not in an obvious way—there’s no menu option, so instead you type a URL in the search field. (The Kindle 3 offers this shortcut as well, but it’s in addition to the menu option. Amazon also advertises the web browser as a feature, whereas B&N makes no mention of a web browser at all in its Nook Touch marketing.)

I’m pretty sure the Nook Touch demo unit I played with was set up to kick me out of the browser after a short period, but I was never able to get beyond a Google search page using the search field shortcut. On Google, I could then search for another page, but inevitably the browser would quit and I’d be redirected to the Nook’s home page.
 

3. Activating the Nook Touch is a pain

Teleread has published a detailed review of the Nook Touch by a blogger named John Schember, and while it’s mostly positive, his description of the mandatory First Run Wizard shows just how far B&N still has to go before mastering the “it just works” design philosophy.

First, John says, you have to be online so the Nook Touch can be activated by B&N’s servers. If you can’t get online at home, you have to go to a B&N store or somewhere with free public Wi-Fi. By contrast, Kindles bought from Amazon ship pre-registered, and in fact you can still use your Kindle to read ebooks even if you never register it or activate the wireless connection.

Next, you have to agree to a 178 page Terms of Service document. Most of the legalese is for the B&N account that you will use with the device, but it’s still an unsettling experience to pay for a device outright and suddenly be forced to agree to a lengthy list of things you can and can’t do on it. As John writes, “It’s my reader, I bought it, I’m not renting it from B&N, they should not be dictating anything to me about the use of my property!”

And finally, you have to have a B&N account. John sums up the problem with this pretty clearly:

Again I do not want my Nook connecting to the internet. I do not want to download books using the Nook. I do not want to register it with my B&N account. I do not use the connectivity features nor do I want them. The Nook does not make this an option. You must sign into a B&N account which registers the device with B&N before you can use the device.

Certainly most people will expect and want the Nook to be able to easily connect to B&N, but if you’re not one of them, you’re out of luck.
 

4. Barnes & Noble uses the home screen for advertising

One result of the forced registration, notes John in his review, is that B&N loads samples onto your Nook at the end. You can archive them so they’re removed from your Nook, but again, by comparison Amazon treats your Kindle as your Kindle and doesn’t put any ebook on it without your permission.

Worse than that, in my opinion, is B&N reserves nearly 50% of the home page to market new books to you in the context of “expert suggestions.” B&N doesn’t make it clear how this section will work—in some shots it looks like your friends’ recommendations will appear there (assuming you have extroverted friends with Nooks), and in other shots it looks like the company will suggest titles. Either way, it’s outside content that’s intended to get you to buy more books.

Amazon does include advertising on special discounted Kindles, but the difference is you have to essentially opt-in (by choosing the “special offers” model), and Amazon compensates you with a $25 price cut. If you just want to compare where book recommendations appear, on the Kindle they show up when you visit the store on your device. Otherwise you don’t see them.

It’s true that at least Nook’s ads are for books, not (as with Amazon) credit cards or special sales. Still, this means that every time you activate your Nook to start reading, you’ll be hit with the E Ink equivalent of in-store advertising from Barnes & Noble.
 

5. Barnes & Noble customer service is awful

Amazon offers a refund policy for Kindle purchases. Barnes & Noble does not. To me, that alone is enough of a differentiator to make me want to shop from Amazon, but it won’t sway everyone.

Here are a couple of more subjective examples that I think illustrate how crummy B&N is with customer service:

First, in John’s review, he mentions that by default B&N sometimes pushes his Nook files to him in PDB format. PDB files work on the first Nook but not on the Nook Touch. When John called customer service to find out what he could do, he was told he simply couldn’t read those books on his Nook! After some online searching, John found that he was only receiving PDB files because he was using a Mac, and in Safari you can fake a different browser’s identity (e.g. Firefox or IE) and receive the EPUB format instead.

The point is, B&N’s own customer service was useless, and in fact essentially told John he couldn’t read the Nook ebooks he’d paid for, without offering a solution. John writes:

B&N support is terrible and will often make you more confused than help you. I am not confident in B&N support and there is quite a bit of miscommunication throughout the company.

Second, my own recent personal experience with B&N’s customer service was hands down the worst I’ve had with any company in at least five years. I’d purchased a Groupon offer and gave the code to my sister, who then applied it along with two gift cards to a big order of books for her sons. Everything we did was within the rules of both Groupon’s and B&N’s fine print (believe me, I quadruple-checked), but B&N’s overzealous fraud department flagged her order and canceled it without explaining why. The easiest thing would have been to walk away and buy the books elsewhere, but we now had two gift card balances and a Groupon purchase invalidated, so we were forced to deal with it. It took—no kidding—ten business days and over twenty phone calls, along with at least three order reversals from active to canceled to active again, before B&N sent the books. And then they left out two of the titles. Their fraud department still thinks my sister is some low-rent con artist, I think.

Although that concerned physical books and not the Nook, it soured me on B&N for a long time, especially since the problem wasn’t with physical inventory but with payment types (meaning it overlaps the Nook space). I’m not surprised at all to see that John couldn’t get any useful information about the format problem when he called.

For my needs, the first issue—not being able to email myself content—is a huge problem. I use my Kindle as an extension of my desktop, shooting web pages and articles over to it so I can read them later when I’m not at my desk, and I like the fact that I can email ebooks to it from Calibre.

I’m guessing the online/registration issues are less bothersome for most consumers. After all, the Nook is designed to work with the cloud, and to do that it has to be online and registered.

I think customer service is a big deal, though. My personal experience with B&N is an extreme case, but I also hate the lack of a refund policy, and as John discovered you may not be able to trust B&N with even basic technical support if a problem arises.

There are plenty of well-documented reasons to buy a Nook Touch, so I’m not saying it’s a bad choice. Just make sure you know what you’re getting into before you commit to it.

PCMag’s reviewer, David Pierce, stacks the deck against Amazon slightly by comparing the $190 Wi-Fi/3G Kindle with the $140 Wi-Fi only Nook Touch. A more straightforward comparison would be the $140 Wi-Fi only Kindle, or even the $114 ad-supported version. Once you remove the misleading 3G price difference, the real features to compare are the input mechanics (physical keyboard vs infrared touchscreen), the user interface, and the battery life.

Pierce writes that the Nook Touch beats the Kindle in all three of those categories. Its home screen is more intuitive and more attractive than the Kindle’s, and its touchscreen interface generally offers a much better way to interact with books, from turning a single page to quickly scrubbing through multiple pages at once. The Nook Touch is also smaller and lighter than the Kindle 3—imagine the Kindle 3 sans keyboard—making it even more pocketable.

However, Pierce notes that it’s not exactly easy to jump from the Kindle platform to the Nook, since both companies use formats that are incompatible with other devices. If you’ve already invested lots of money in a Kindle library, you’re sort of stuck with Amazon unless you’re willing to strip any DRM and convert the files yourself.

There are three points the review touches on that I think deserve more emphasis to help a consumer decide what to buy. First, if you want 3G you’ll want to stick with the more expensive Kindle model. Second, if you want an easy way to customize your home screen with screensaver images and you don’t want to install a hack, the Nook Touch is a better choice because it supports custom images right out of the box. Third, the Nook Touch will support library ebook loans, something the Kindle can’t do—Amazon has promised this functionality later this year, but so far hasn’t provided details.

And finally, there’s one thing I disagree with from the review, and I think it’s also an important factor in making a purchasing decision. Without explicitly saying it beats Amazon, Pierce suggests that the Barnes & Noble Nook store is just as good or better, but in my experience the Amazon Kindle store easily bests it in every way. For example, Amazon has a seven day refund policy on Kindle books, while Barnes & Noble has a no-refunds policy. Amazon also has a bigger selection if you don’t count public domain works, and I don’t since they’re freely available for pretty much any device. Finally, in my experience Amazon offers better prices if you exclude agency-priced books, which are the same price everywhere. Of course, as I mentioned above, if you know how to remove DRM from ebooks then you can shop pretty much anywhere you like.

On average, it seems clear that the Nook Touch is the new champ in the no-frills ebook device category, and although nobody has had a chance to put the forthcoming Kobo Touch through its paces yet, I suspect that it will place second in a comparison of hardware and user interface (although Kobo’s store is probably third after Amazon and B&N).

That puts the Kindle 3, viewed by many as the best device on the market for the past nine months, in a surprising third place. Unless Amazon incorporates a similar touchscreen or comes up with some other killer feature in the near future, I imagine a lot of ebook consumers are going to be buying Nook Touches this year. Most likely I’ll be one of them.

“Barnes & Noble Nook Touch Reader” [PCMag.com]

That’s where Kindle App News comes in. The blog was started earlier this year by someone named JP, who writes, “I’m doing this because I love my Kindle and I want to see that simple functionality used for more than just reading.” The blog’s focus is exclusively Kindle apps, so you’ll always find the newest releases and anything that’s on sale each month. JP has grouped the apps under logical categories like board games, education and free games, so it’s pretty easy to find something you want.

Speaking of which, if you’ve been wanting to download some Kindle apps but were put off by the prices, Amazon is having a huge 99 cent sale through March 27th. It’s a great time to try out some games or apps for a dollar each. There’s a new Notepad app in particular that I imagine lots of Kindle owners have been waiting impatiently for.

Kindle App News

Jottit.com

My favorite service, after testing half a dozen over the weekend, is Jottit. It starts with a deceptively simple interface — just a box to type in — but once you’ve set it up you have access to so much more. In the admin panel, you can:

• set a custom URL (e.g. “mykindlepage.jottit.com”);
• review and compare past edits;
• change the fonts and the masthead color for when you’re using a PC browser;
• add password protection at both the public and admin levels; and
• add more pages.

I didn’t love the editing interface when you’re trying to use it on the Kindle, but it was manageable. I also thought that while the web mode display on the Kindle is readable, it’s a little narrow. However, the article mode display is nearly perfect.

Pen.io

Pen.io was announced last week, and it’s what prompted me to compare these services in the first place. Its big strength is that it produces highly readable, clean text displays, and with a simple tag you can even create multiple-page entries. On the Kindle, however, the multiple-page feature doesn’t work in article mode, and the Pen.io display is too wide in web mode, which means the Kindle layers a zoom box over the page.

Like Jottit, Pen.io also lets you choose a custom URL and use basic HTML markup to format your text. If you expect that you’ll spend more time accessing this page on a PC browser than a Kindle browser, the zoom feature might not bother you so much.

Wrttn.me

Wrttn.me is, in some ways, the best of the three: not only does it have many of the same editing features as Jottit, but you can even add your own CSS to a page for extreme customization. Kindle web display uses the full width, which is good, although the font is a little small. Article mode is pretty much perfect.

One thing I don’t like is that the public URL, which isn’t customizable, is different from the admin URL, so you end up managing two URLs for one page.

I found Jottit to be slightly easier to use if you’re spending a lot of time on the Kindle, but I think this comes down to personal taste. (I have a soft spot for tiddlywiki-style sites — don’t ask — so Jottit feels more like an old friend.)

Summary

All three services let you use basic HTML or simple markdown tags to apply basic formatting, and all three work pretty well on the Kindle 3, so the best solution for you will partly be a matter of taste.

One thing I discovered is that you might have trouble getting the Kindle’s article mode to work if you just include lists of links, because the Kindle browser looks for paragraphs to figure out what’s an “article.” If you get an error when choosing article mode, try adding a few paragraphs of text to the bottom of your list. In my experience, Jottit.com was the only service that didn’t have this problem.

There were four other services I also looked at — notepad.cc, write.fm, publ.ca, and tidypub.org — but they’re all missing crucial features. Three of them don’t let you make edits after saving your text, while notepad.cc essentially lacks a save button, meaning you can never preserve what you’re typing. In my opinion these four services are almost useless right now, so I’m not recommending them. However, if you still want to try them out, publ.ca and tidypub.org are the two with better Kindle interfaces.

Finally, right after getting this post ready to publish, I came across a new service called Quicklyst. I haven’t tested it yet, but The Digital Reader says that overall it’s pretty good.

So, what am I supposed to do with these things?

I’ve listed several use cases below, but to my mind these notepad services are ideal for creating a personalized start page on your Kindle. You can add your own links from your Kindle or a PC web browser, then bookmark the page on the Kindle for easier access, and update the links or add notes directly from your Kindle whenever you feel like it. I’ve also included some starter code for such a page at the bottom of this post.

Here are some other ideas:

Idea #1: Participate in a virtual book club
Say you and at least one other person are reading the same book, but you’re not in the same location. You can leave notes about the book, theme, coffee you’re drinking, etc. and your friend can add her own comments as well. You create a shared document that you can access from your PC web browser later.

Now that Amazon has launched “Public Notes,” you can also manage this sort of thing using your Kindle’s built-in notes and highlighting features. It’s more convenient because you’ll be able to read and leave notes within the text, but there are two potential drawbacks. The first is that Amazon’s system works best on Kindle texts, so those reading other editions might not appreciate it. The second problem is that there are some privacy issues: you can’t control who accesses your public notes, and you can’t limit access to just one title.

By comparison, if you use a web-based service, then anyone with a browser can also access the notes, and at least one service will let you password protect the page.

Idea #2: Publish to the web from your Kindle
It’s a very simplified way to post text-only content from your Kindle device, without the need to go through the more robust (meaning complicated) backend of a traditional blog. Because these services are almost all text-only, they’re very Kindle friendly.

But don’t expect to create a real blog this way, meaning you can forget about menus, connected pages, and archives. Don’t expect it to be a permanent solution, either. If you use one of these services to publish from your Kindle, you should also regularly save the published content elsewhere, either as a real blog or a private backup.

Idea #3: Publish your writing to a group
Narrowcast your short stories, essays and poems to a group of friends, fans, classmates, or forum members. Another way to do this would be to collect everyone’s Kindle email address, and ask each person to add your email address to their “approved senders” lists; going the notepad route sort of does this in reverse, where the Kindle owners in your group simply visit a single URL each time. This is an easy way to get your content onto their Kindles and web browsers without having to deal with email addresses, spam filters, or formatting problems.

Idea #4: Create an editable start page for your Kindle
(This is the one I mentioned above.) Create a page of links using one of these services, then bookmark the page on your Kindle. Now you have a page of quicklinks that you can customize directly from your Kindle as well as from a PC browser.

Just remember that this isn’t meant to store confidential information; if you don’t use a service with password protection, it’s possible that your links could be seen by strangers, and even on the password-enabled sites you’re relying on an unproven third-party website to store your data.

Here are some sample quick links to get you started. Just copy the contents of that text file and paste it into any of the three services I recommended above, and you’ll have a beginning template that you can then customize to your liking. Remember, though, that you may have to add some paragraphs of text to force your Kindle to render the page correctly in article mode.

(Photo: Dr Stephen Dann)