ReadWriteWeb

People didn't understand the iPad immediately. No one believed in the form factor. "Just a big iPhone," people called it. But it caught on, it took off, and now consumers can't let go of their tablets. The intimate, intuitive interface has created its own use case. People curl up with the device and they read.

Publishers and app developers have provided a bonanza of ways to read on the iPad and iPhone. Some are free, some cost money, some require monthly subscriptions. All of them are vying for your attention in that new, valuable hour or two of tablet time in the evenings. But one app, Instapaper, sits in the iPad Hall of Fame on iTunes, pushing forward reader behavior just like the iPad itself. Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, answered some questions for us about where this is all heading.

Instapaper, the popular content-shifting mobile app for Web articles, has rolled out a major update to its apps for iPad and iPhone.

The most immediately noticeable enhancement in Instapaper 4.0 is that the app's interface has been redesigned. On the iPad, it offers a a more magazine-like layout in which articles sit side-by-side in a grid (rather than a list). The list view still remains on the iPhone, for obvious screen real estate reasons, but its contents have been restyled.

Amazon nudged the experience of reading books ever-so-slightly further into the future today. The company announced a new feature for its Kindle reading platform that lets readers ask authors questions about their books as they're reading.

The new program, called @author, lets Kindle users highlight a passage and then ask the author a question about it via their Amazon author page or Twitter. Only questions as long as 100 characters can be asked from within the e-book itself, but more in-depth curiosities can be posted to the author's official page on Amazon.

Stop me if you've heard this one: A service that pulls in your feeds from around the Web for you to read. A service that provides a storefront for discovering and subscribing to Web publications. A service that lets you follow updates from your favorite Web personalities. A service that personalizes the news for you based on your interests and friends. A service that emails you a digest of your top stories. A service that cleans up Web articles and presents them to you in a pretty interface. A service that lets you quickly save articles to read later.

Now, name that service... Well wait, those each sound like the features of a different app you've heard of, maybe even used, don't they? Google Reader, Apple and Amazon stores, Twitter, News.me, Flipboard, Read It Later. How many of these things do you use for reading? More than one? Now, imagine if you only needed one reading app. That's what Adeel Raza, founder of Readings, imagines.

Amazon announced today its Kindle application for Apple mobile devices including the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, now offers embedded video and audio clips within its e-books. At launch time, there are just thirteen titles sporting the new functionality, including a cookbook augmented by video demos and a nature guide called Bird Songs that lets you read about - and hear - various bird calls.

But this is only the beginning, says Amazon. "We look forward to seeing what authors and publishers create...using the new functionality," said Dorothy Nicholls, director of Amazon's Kindle unit.

Most of the writing you find on the Web - including here on ReadWriteWeb - is relatively short. Long-form journalism often doesn't fit into the 24-hour news cycle and most online readers don't really have the time to sit down and dedicate half an hour to just one story on the Web in the middle of the week. Longform.org aims to highlight the best long-form journalism on the web and make it more convenient to read these stories. Thanks to its integration with Instapaper, Longform.org makes it easy to bookmark these long stories and read them on your mobile phone or iPad once you can dedicate enough time to them.

As technology becomes more a part of our day-to-day lives, some are worried that it is stunting the education of children by taking away time from activities like reading. A startling discovery from the London-based National Literacy Trust finds that children are more likely these days to own a cell phone than they are a book. The study, which NLT will publish next week, ties cell phone penetration to the presence of books in a child's home, but are these conclusions fair to draw?

Here on ReadWriteStart we are often providing resources and tips for young companies looking to raise funding from venture capitals and angel investors. This week's recommendation for our Weekend Reading series, Money Magnet: How to Attract Investors to Your Business by Jacoline Loewen, is a book aimed at helping entrepreneurs learn how to deal with financing and how to make their businesses attractive to investors.

With the week coming to a close and the weekend just a few hours away, we thought we would take the opportunity to recommend a few books for the entrepreneur looking to do some weekend reading. Whether you've got a lot of time to sit and read, or just a little time in the car to listen to an audiobook, find some time to knock these off your reading list.

While reading is one of the main activities on the Internet, a lot of sites pay very little attention to the readability of their text. Instead, the reader's eye is constantly drawn to other UI elements, ads, and widgets. Arc90's Readability experiment is setting out to change this. Readability is a small bookmarklet that extracts the text from almost any web site and displays it on an easy to read page that removes all of the clutter that can make reading on the Internet so hard sometimes.