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.

At this point, Apple's lead in tablets is daunting. At a base price of $499, the 9.5-inch iPad and the devices it inspired are even encroaching on the bottom end of the PC market. Apple's "post-PC world" rhetoric is projected to be surprisingly prescient.

But there seems to be room below the iPad in the market. Surveys found consumers clamoring for a cheaper tablet, and Apple competitors have begun to deliver. Amazon announced the 7-inch, $199 Kindle Fire in September, and in response Barnes & Noble unveiled a $249 Nook Tablet yesterday with twice the memory and storage space of the Fire.

The Amazon and Barnes & Noble tablets are geared towards consumption, as one would expect from two companies whose businesses were built on selling books and music. Apple is in the content business as well, though it positions the iPad to be for much more than that. Even so, consumption, specifically reading, of quality content has been reborn on the iPad.

The Reading App Gold Rush

Developers have built all kinds of applications to deliver the ideal iPad reading experience, and Big Publishing wants in on the action. Flipboard publishers now show magazine-style full-page ads, and Zite was bought by CNN. AOL made Editions, Yahoo made Livestand, Google's making Propeller, all to do the same thing. It's a gold rush.

Publishers are even building their own apps now, and the new iOS 5 Newsstand provides a home for them. The Guardian iPad edition launched the same day as iOS 5. The New Yorker iPad app has surpassed 100,000 readers. These are first-rate iPad experiences, not just crumpled Web views, and they're finding traction as subscription publications.

Instapaper's Content Shift

But one $5 app, not affiliated with any publishers, showing no advertisements, requiring no "monetizing" other than its modest price tag, and created by one person, has remained near the top of the heap of iOS reading apps all along. Instapaper continues to introduce iPad and iPhone readers to the notion of content-shifting, saving one's daily Web reading with one click, so that it can be read later from one sparse, quiet place, even offline.

Really, Instapaper can be read in three places; anyone can use Instapaper.com from her or his desktop, tablet or smartphone. But it's also a universal $5 app for iPhone and iPad, and the release of Instapaper 4.0 last month redesigned the experience as the self-curated, instant newspaper for iOS 5.

Arment recently answered a few questions for us about Instapaper, iOS and the future of reading:

***ReadWriteWeb:** Do you think about the big picture for Web content, or is that not really your concern?*

Marco Arment: "I want Instapaper to be a tool that people use to read longer pieces, and more attentively, than they otherwise would have. By doing this, I hope to make it more feasible for publishers to maintain an audience while publishing articles more substantial than what we usually see on formulaic high-volume blogs."

***RWW:** What are your plans for Give Me Something To Read?*

MA: "Give Me Something To Read serves Instapaper very well as a curated list of the best long-form nonfiction writing and reporting. My plans are to keep it going, really -- it's exactly where I want it to be."

***RWW:** You said recently that you don't like to emphasize the offline part of Instapaper. Why is that? Isn't that a distinguishing feature?*

MA: "It's certainly a very good and useful feature, but it's not a feature that a lot of people know that they need, so they aren't looking for a solution to that problem. Once they have Instapaper, it's a feature that most customers use and benefit from very often, but it's not a very good selling point."

***RWW:** Is iOS changing the way we read at a platform level? The great RSS readers have some of their most compelling apps ever on iOS, and the competitors in the publishing biz are there, too. Even major content sites (like The Guardian) are starting to put save-for-later functionality into native apps. Is the nature of the whole platform responsible for this? Or have you just inspired everyone?*

MA: "The iPhone, and especially the iPad, have brought a fundamental shift to the publishing business: it's now very easy for customers to pay for apps and content directly, with small amounts of money, in large volumes. This wasn't (and still isn't) practical on the web. And with the rising popularity of iOS, many millions of people are devoting more of their computing time to devices that are much better suited for reading than desktops and laptops.

"These two shifts, more than anything, have brought new life to the publishing business, from big newspapers and magazines to individual bloggers, by increasing demand for content and making it easier to make money without wedging ads everywhere.

"Instapaper and its various clones help bridge the web and iOS worlds. There's relatively little competition only because it's a very new problem that the mass market has yet to realize that they have. It's not just "read later", but "read elsewhere" - most people would prefer the reading experience on an iPad to a web browser on a PC."

The iPad And The Couch

Instapaper is not the only cross-platform content-shifting app out there, and we've argued that all tablet reading apps should have the feature. The Guardian's new iPad app does.

But the single content-shifting app, - like Instapaper or Read It Later - pulls all the day's articles into one familiar place, like the iPad's equivalent of the couch on which we read it. That's the most important part of the future of content, which the ad-riddled Web is only just starting to understand: the experience.

Marco Arment is the creator of Instapaper. He also blogs about technology (and coffee) at Marco.org, and he hosts Build & Analyze a weekly news and discussion show about iPhone, iPad, iOS and mobile Web development with Dan Benjamin on 5by5. Follow him on Twitter @marcoarment.

Do you use any content-shifting apps for your daily reading? Share your digital reading habits in the comments.

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.

A refreshed UI is only the beginning of what this update includes. There are improvements to the reading experience itself, such as the option to adjust the screen's brightness from the app and invert the colors of the text and background (white on black as opposed to black on white). The app also makes better use of the iPhone's limited screen real estate by hiding the status bar that normally sits across the top of the screen.

The app also features more condensed footnotes and enhancements to how articles are archived and deleted. Not only is the distinction between "archive" and delete" more clear in this version, but you can multi-select articles from the home screen to get rid of them in bulk.

One of the cooler features in the new version of the app is its Wikipedia integration. Instapaper now lets you look up words and phrases on Wikipedia as you read, just as you've long been able to look up words in the dictionary. The app displays a brief description of a topic from Wikipedia and provides a link to the full article should you want to find out more.

Improved content discovery is something that's baked into this update in a few places. The "Friends" tab now shows content from all of your social contacts, rather than just those who have Instapaper accounts. This brings Instapaper a notch closer to what Flipboard does, albeit without the famously slick, page-turning UI.

Version 4.0 also includes a new article search tool, which scans the full text of every article you have saved in Instapaper. It's available as part of the service's $1 per month subscription, so those dying to use it will have to pay up.

This really is the biggest update to Instapaper in quite some time. For the full list of new features, check out developer Marco Arment's in-depth blog post announcing version 4.0.

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.

If you've got something nasty to say, this probably isn't the place to do it, as Amazon encourages readers to "behave as if you were a guest at a friend's dinner party" and leave profanity and insults out of it.

The feature represents, as Nieman Journalism Lab so effectively put it, a step toward "a book culture that is increasingly author-driven" rather than one driven strictly by publishers or even necessarily books. Amazon is "is charting a new course for the publishing industry" by "commodifying the charisma of the authors who sell material on its platforms," Nieman Lab's Megan Garber writes.

Continues Garber:

Already we're seeing new, largely tablet-driven publishing platforms challenging and transforming our assumptions about what a book is and can be; already we're seeing publishing platforms that emphasize authors' fan communities as value propositions unto themselves. @Author is the next step in that process: the digital commodification of authorship that takes place by way of community and conversation.

Amazon took a step toward social reading earlier this year with the quiet launch of Kind Profiles, which let users display their reading activity and connect with other readers in a Goodreads-style feature.

The @author feature is in limited beta right now, and appears to only be available on Kindle devices rather than from within the Kindle app on other platforms. Participating authors include Tim Ferris, Susan Orlean, Steven Johnson and about a dozen others.

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.

By offering these different ways of following content, Readings aims to provide the best one-stop reading shop with its news feed. Not only does Readings allow you to subscribe directly to publications, it automatically identifies individual authors from all the publications listed and lets you follow them personally. According to Raza, the site currently features 54,000 individual authors. The author feed includes the author's posts to his or her main site, but it also draws in public posts from Twitter, Facebook and Flickr (with more services to come), making it a central location for any kinds of updates from that person. The ability to follow individual authors is a distinguishing feature, and it's made possible by the inclusion of all the other feeds.

Currently, Readings creates author feeds automatically by scraping the sites whose content it pulls in, which are themselves created based on popularity around the Web. Eventually, though, Readings wants authors to control and curate their own author feeds. "Our real plan is not to keep it automated forever," Raza says. "Our real plan is for authors to be able to sign up there and own their own profile." But the author page won't be just another site for content creators to update. It will pull in their updates from Twitter and existing services. "We just want to complement the feeds that you have," Raza says, by combining them all in one place.

Raza says that Readings currently lists about 15,000 publications, and while it mostly just aggregates, it has more involved partnerships with some sites. For example, while subscribing directly to CNN.com feeds through an RSS reader only provides an excerpt, CNN and Readings have arranged to show the whole text. Currently, Readings doesn't scrape content from paywalled sites, but eventually it would be able to feature them in the store after arranging a partnership.

Concentrating on growth

For now, though, Readings is concentrated on growing its user base, rather than its retinue of authors or publishers. Raza says they plan to launch an iPad app in "about a month." The site has been open for a month, and Raza says that it's still in public beta, but the last month has been spent busily fixing bugs and performance issues without concentrating on gaining users. "We made the system stable," says Raza, "we made it scalable, and that's done now."

The algorithms behind the scenes do some nifty work to present the content attractively, even though it's a largely automated process. For example, Raza says the algorithm for identifying a story's key image can even find it in a frame of an embedded video if there's no static image in the post.

Saving for later

The Read Later feature is one of the most ambitious features of Readings, since dedicated read-later services like Read It Later and Instapaper are so well-established. Those services are most valuable for their ability to save content from any Web page and cache it in a personal reading list for later, with all one's collected reading available in one place. Readings offers a browser bookmarklet that offers the same feature, even for sites and publications not included in its database.

Until the Readings mobile app launches, the other read-later services will have a leg up, but depending on how the app is executed, this could be a big move. Currently, one has to use other apps for finding reading material and save to the Read It Later or Instapaper service from there. Readings can offer new content from feeds and saved stories all in one place. It also reminds users of unread items in the weekly email digest (you can turn it off), which Instapaper and Read It Later don't do, so stories tend to quickly pile up there, if one isn't dedicated about reading every day.

The one key feature where reading apps have to compete, though, is the visual reading experience itself. If it's hard to read in an app, users won't do it. That's why services that improve the visual reading experience exist in the first place, since most content sites are so cluttered. Readings makes a concerted effort to make its content beautiful, converting all fonts to Verdana with adjustable sizes and arranging text in neat, squared-off paragraphs around embedded images. This only works for supported publications, though; saved pages from outside Readings will load in full within the Readings iframe.

And the Web interface of Readings still has a ways to go to look as good (or be as customizable) as Read It Later and Instapaper, and there is no native tablet version yet. That will be a crowded market, too; in addition to the native Read It Later and Instapaper apps, Flipboard has put some advanced Web technology to work to create its layouts, and it allows publishers to customize their layouts for reading in Flipboard.

But for a first public version, Readings is an impressive reading solution, and anything that can reduce the number of apps and websites required just to read one's daily articles is a welcome addition to the market. Interface improvements are less important than powerful underlying software, and Readings has that. Could it be enough to disrupt the personal reading space by rolling so many services into one? Time will tell.

What apps, sites, or services do you use to manage your daily reading? Let us know in the comments.

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.

On the hardware front, Amazon last week dropped prices for the Kindle 3G to $189 from $259, to better compete with Barnes & Noble's Nook device, now $199 for its 3G version. Now, on the software side, Amazon is ushering in a new era for digital books, with these "augmented editions" that offer more than just text.

Beyond the "Accompanying CD-ROM"

Of course, the idea to sell multimedia content along with a book is not, in and of itself, a new idea. Over the years, plenty of books have been sold with accompanying CD-ROMs or DVDs with additional material, especially in educational texts where study guides, video tutorials, practice tests and digital references come in handy.

But it hasn't been until the e-reader era that the ability to view these extras has been so seamlessly integrated with the reading experience itself. You no longer have to place the book down, insert a physical disk into a computer and then launch the book's extras. It's all blended into one package.

Reinventing Reading?

Already, the technology is enabling new experiences, such as in the digital guidebook, Rick Steves' London, which offers five narrated audio tours of famous landmarks like the British Museum and St. Paul's Cathedral. You can read the book on your iPhone or iPad then pop in your headphones to take a tour.

But will these new augmented digital experiences truly usher in a new way to read? It may be too early to tell the broader impact the technology will have on the world at large, but outside Amazon's universe, there are several publishers who are embracing the new digital format, both in e-books and e-magazines, with innovative offerings.

The Alice in Wonderland iPad App, for example, was recently touted as a "reinvention" of reading, with its animations and interactive content. But really it's just a pop-up book re-imagined for the digital age. There's also a collection of digital magazines for the iPad, each experimenting with how best to incorporate media like video, audio and music, along with their text-based content. Wired's iPad edition, for instance, offers video and audio in addition to news articles, leading to initial sales rivaling that of its newsstand counterpart. Entertainment Weekly, on the other hand, pared down its magazine for the iPad, with its launch of the EW "Must List," a weekly top 10 featuring the best in film, books, TV and music where each item is linked to associated media like song clips or movie trailers.

For book publishers, there are numerous possibilities to offer multimedia extras similar to these. But outside of reference books and nonfiction, writers will need to be careful about overindulging in these media bonuses. The point of reading - well, reading fiction at least - is not to see, but see with your mind's eye. Imagination will always surpass media, no matter how new and glossy it is. Publishers should not fear the technology, though, but implement it thoughtfully and carefully going forward.

Longform.org is the brainchild of Max Linsky - a former Creative Loafing reporter and Slate contributor - and Aaron Lammer. The stories on the site cover a wide range of topics, ranging from Neal Pollack's recent Wired story about the check-in wars, to this New Yorker story about elevators from 2008 and this in-depth look at a penal colony off the coast of Panama. The selection of stories on the site is obviously subjective, but if you come across a great story that hasn't appeared on the site yet, you can also submit your own suggestions.

You can find a more in-depth look behind the scenes of Longform.org in the Slate piece here, but if you are looking for some stimulating reading material just head over to the site and give it a try. You can read the stories without an Instapaper account, but the site's tight integration with this service allows you to easily bookmark stories and read them on the Instapaper mobile apps later.

"Our research illustrates the clear link with literacy resources at home and a child's reading ability," said Jonathan Douglas, Director of the NLT. "By ensuring children have access to reading materials in the home and by encouraging children to love reading, families can help them to do well at school and to enjoy opportunities throughout their life."

The connection between books and cell phones in the hands of children is a strange one for the NLT to make. In the press release announcing the study, NLT does not define what they consider to constitute "owning a book," - a significant factor that could change the way readers interpret the study. There are, however, ways to help the literacy problems by taking advantage of the popularity of mobile devices.

While children certainly seem more interested in chatting with friends on their phones than sitting quietly and reading a book, some argue that this debate shouldn't become about the media which children consume. Teacher and education blogger Vicki Davis told ReadWriteWeb that she believes kids benefit from reading on phones or computers as much as they do from paper.

"Whether on a mobile phone, iPod, Kindle, or handheld device or paper - the medium should be irrelevant. The important thing is that students can read and write, or in this case read and text," said Davis. "If ancient man had demanded that their children continue to use their tools - we would still be looking for cave walls to draw upon - paper has been an essential tool of the mass-produced industrial age and electronics are the essential produce of the interconnected information age. Education needs to wake up and harness these tools for learning!"

Redefining "Reading"

Michelle Manafy, editorial director at Information Today, says older generations need to open up their definitions of what "books" actually are. "The very notion of literacy and reading itself has evolved beyond the capacity of many who grew up with linear reading experiences to understand," she says.

"If every kid has a phone, then maybe we need to be looking much harder at creating content optimized for this reading environment, to creating a reading experience that coincides with their voracious appetite and shorter attention spans, with their tangentially and serendipitously connected non-linear reading style and socially mediated tastes," said Manafy

Mobile technology blogger Jason Harris agrees with Davis and Manafy, and adds that the drop in reading skills are likely due to a combination of factors.

"The world is changing in that mobile phones are falling into the hands of new populations, including young children," said Harris. "Of course, there's a competition for time in this age group, so if they're on their mobile phones then all leisure activities, including reading, will take a hit. But are reading scores falling because of this one factor? I doubt it."

Are Parents to Blame?

Marnie Webb, co-CEO of TechSoup Global says the technology is not to blame for the decline in reading skills. As she puts it, the onus is on the parents to make sure the kids have the same access to books as they do phones.

"It doesn't have to be an either or. We can't make it an either or," says Webb. "But that seems to me to be up to grownups [...] I have to put the books in the kid's pocket. Just like we put the phone in the kids' pockets."

Agreeing with Webb is Peggy Anne Salz, founder of MSearchGroove.com, a leading blog on mobile search. Salz says the report is "a call to parents to participate in their children's education, a process they can only improve and enhance with anytime, anywhere mobile access to educational materials."

"Read between the lines, and this is not about a connection between children having a mobile device and any drop in grade school literacy skills," adds Salz. "The report argues there is a link between having literacy resources at home and a child's reading ability. That's an access issue that mobile devices can solve for children in the U.K. and around the world."

It is certainly true that mobile handset penetration is reaching a younger and younger audience, but that is not necessarily a direct catalyst to lowering reading scores. Whether the presence of books in a home affects a child's ability to read is another argument, but it seems strange to try and hook that on mobile phone usage. As technology evolves, so too will the way kids "read" and consume information, so basing studies on the presence of older forms of information digestion may become less and less appropriate.

UPDATE: I received a response after reaching out on Twitter to LeVar Burton, known famously for his love of reading and as the host of the children's show Reading Rainbow. What did the book lover think of the fact that more children own phones than books? "I believe kids need both," he said.

Photo by Flickr user eyeliam.

Readability doesn't work on every site, but we tested it on most popular news sites and blogs, and it worked almost everywhere. Most of the time, Readability will also display comments when you are reading a blog post. While it displays most images, however, the bookmarklet sadly deletes every embedded video.

What About Those Ads?

Removing the clutter, of course, also means removing the advertising that a lot of sites need to run to make a living. For sites that rely on click-through ads, Readability is just about as bad as AdBlock Plus (or the more anarchic Add-Art), but sites that get paid per ad impression probably won't care too much about this, as the regular page still has to be loaded before you can activate the Readability bookmarklet.

Instapaper, which Arc90 credits as an inspiration, of course, also has a text-only reading mode for saved pages, but its focus is less on making the text readable and more on saving a copy of the page. Unlike Readability, Instapaper also doesn't display any of the images embedded in a text.

In this latest version, the metadata you're able to see includes the number of FriendFeed conversations, the number of Diggs, and the number of times the post has been shared in Google Reader or Feedly. To the right of those informational icons are more buttons that let you share the post in Google Reader/Feedly, save the page for later reading (star in Google Reader), Twitter the page, or email it to a friend.

When you've finished reading (and interacting) with the content on your screen, there's a "next" button which you can click to go to the next recommendation in your Feedly/Google Reader.

Integrated Twitter and FriendFeed

In addition to providing tools that help you better understand and share the blog posts you read, Feedly also reminds you how you came across them in the first place. If you originally saw the post on Twitter, a small notification will pop-up to remind you of that tweet and on the notification window there's an option to reply or re-tweet the information directly from the web page you're currently on.

Alternately, if the article you're reading is hot on FriendFeed, Feedly Mini's pop-up will notify you of a popular conversation around the blog's content occurring on FriendFeed. With one click, you can then join that conversation.

If you're not a fan of notifications or just want to dial them back a bit, you can do so from a preference knob called "Mini Friendfeed Notifications" which allows you to control and customize the behavior of these notifications.

How To Get It

All these new features will be made available today as part of a Feedly update to v 1.2 patch 170. If you're not seeing these features yet, don't worry - Feedly is good about delivering automatic updates to their users. In other words, you can install Feedly now, then sit back and wait for the magic to happen. If you do end up trying the new version, you can let @feedly on Twitter know what you think. If you run into any problems, you can log it on get satisfaction where every ticket is responded to within 24 hours.

You never know what Feedly will add next. Past updates includes integration with Ubiquity, integration with your Google Search, and more. Based on the image below, it appears that Twitter and FriendFeed are only the start of Feedly's planned integrations for this increasingly useful tool.

Ambient News is a new Firefox add-on written by Mozilla developer Atul Varma and is currently available as an alpha release. The add-on tracks your browsing habits, learning which sites you visit most frequently. It then pulls the headlines in from those sites and displays them for you in a beautifully fading list every time you open a new tab in Firefox. If you see something that interests you, just click the link and you'll be taken to the web site where the headline originated. Privacy advocates, rest assured - no data is shared outside your browser.

Intelligent Agents to the Rescue!

As Michael Calore of Wired notes, the add-on is a great workaround for the biggest usability problem facing RSS. "Many people don't know what it is or how to take advantage of it," he writes. "The first hint that a feed exists is a funky orange or blue icon. Click on it and, in most cases, you get prompted to load another application. Sometimes, you just see ugly, raw XML output."

But since we're mostly web geeks here at ReadWriteWeb, we're more enthralled with another aspect to this tool: its intelligence. As we mentioned not too long ago, cloud agents are on the rise. The term, coined by blogger Chris Arkenberg, refers to automated agents that help us better deal with the volumes of data we have to sort through every day. Although Ambient News isn't necessary a full-on cloud agent - it doesn't actually work in the cloud - it can still certainly be considered an agent, especially since it helps us sort through a barrage of information in a new way.

Other Alternatives

Ambient News is not the only alternative to the traditional RSS Reader. Over the past year at ReadWriteWeb, we've also made mention of other alternative news readers like Feedly, which puts a magazine-style interface on top of Google Reader. Another popular RSS reader is Snackr, an Adobe AIR app that scrolls headlines across your screen like a news ticker. Then there is, of course, FriendFeed, a lifestreaming application that's quickly becoming an alternative way to share information among the early adopter set.

Alternative RSS readers aren't for everyone, though - journalists, bloggers, researchers, and the like may still need to use a jam-packed feed reader in order to seek out the elusive info they seek on a regular basis. But for those of you who are more casual web surfers and blog readers, alternative RSS readers are a less stressful way to get your news without the news getting to you.

In case you're unfamiliar, Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort where contributors digitize, archive, and distribute cultural works. Because of copyright law and restrictions, the majority of the site's content comes from public domain books. Unbelievably, the project was created in 1971, when founder Michael Hart keyed in The United States Declaration of Independence and informed the first 100 internet users.

Given the popularity and ubiquity of mobile phones, it's somewhat surprising that Project Gutenberg didn't already have a mobile edition until now. We suppose it's better late than never, though. And considering the vast size of their catalog, any effort to transform the books into mobile formats was surely not something they took lightly.

The PG Mobile software is based on the common Java file format (JAR) readable on nearly all handsets. The mobile books are downloaded as a Java applications and can be installed either using WAP (over the air), Bluetooth, serial connection, infrared, or data cable. There's no size limit to how many you can store - you are only limited by the storage capabilities of your handset. To access these books, just visit Gutenberg.org and click on the JAR link to have the mobile book installed on your phone.

What, No iPhone App?

In our world, it's perhaps hard to imagine that someone would choose to launch a Java-based app instead of (or perhaps prior to?) an iPhone version. However, that choice was certainly made based on the fact that Java runs on billions of phones worldwide where Apple, although strong in terms of revenue and growth, only represents 2.3% of the global handset marketshare.

However, iPhone readers already have several options for accessing eBooks on their mobile phones, including the popular Stanza eBook reader (iTunes link) as well as the other options we noted before. The trick is delivering that same access to large parts of the world where literature and educational materials are less available than they are for us. That's clearly what Project Gutenberg hopes to do with this mobile offering, and we have to applaud them for that.

When managing your reading list through the bookmarklet, you now have more options as well. You can view your list as either "normal" or "condensed," select how many items to show per page, open the list in the sidebar, and enable or disable various context menus and additional toolbar buttons.

However, the best feature to come to your reading list is the ability to sort it by PostRank. This functionality, formerly called AideRSS, is something we've been big fans of here at RWW for some time. With PostRank enabled, your reading list is intelligently filtered by popularity. Posts are scored in several ways, including number of comments it received, number of times it's been tagged in Del.icio.us, number of diggs, and how many inbound links it has received. So now, you can read your list in order of importance, an especially useful feature for those suffering from information overload.

Other improvements like updated privacy controls and tweaks to existing features round out this latest release, making Read It Later a great addition to your browser whether that's Firefox or IE. Now all we need is an iPhone bookmarklet and we'll be all set.

"Here Ends the Beginning is much more than a conventional e-book," wrote Furlong to us in an emailed press release. "The text is punctuated throughout with video clips and photographs of actors recreating the characters and scenes. Music and sound effects further enhance this novel experience."

The first 5 chapters of the 43-chapter-long book are available for free, with the full book available for $12.95 CDN. But is this really the future of the novel?

We've seen a lot of experimentation with the traditional book publishing format over the past year. From an author using Amazon's Kindle ebook reader to beta test his book to one using blog comments to peer review another. From books being written and released on cell phones to novels being serialized and released over LiveJournal, Twitter, and Google Maps. Unfortunately, none of these experiences have so far been able to match the enjoyable, intimate feeling of curling up with an real, printed book -- at least for me.

Writing about Penguin's Google Maps-based novel mashup in April, Booklist's Keir Graff wrote, "It's an odd sensation, really: simple words can evoke a world in our imaginations, but as soon as the words are married to real-world images, they lose much of their power." The same thing can be said of Furlong's Quillr concept. While videos and images flowed well as far as where and how they were inserted into the text, they seemed to detract from my reading experience by breaking up the continuity of the "inner movie" I develop whenever I read a piece of fiction. Also, constantly having to scroll and click while reading a long piece of writing can be frustrating -- it's just not as natural or satisfying as turning pages in a book.

But perhaps that's due to my advanced age of 24 years old (ha!). Maybe multimedia-enhanced, web-delivered books will resonate better with a younger set of readers. Give Furlong's book a chance and then come back here and leave a comment letting us know what you thought. Is this an enjoyable way to read a book? Or are publishers barking up the wrong tree with experiments in web publishing that mash books with web technology?

Jakob Nielson, web usability consultant, author, and owner of useit.com, writes on his site about a recent research study by Harald Weinreich, Hartmut Obendorf, Eelco Herder, and Matthias Mayer: "Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use."

What Nielsen found by analyzing the data in the study was that although people spend more time on pages with more words and more information, they only spend 4.4 seconds more for each additional 100 words. By calculating reading rates, he concluded that when you add more verbiage to a page, people will only read 18% of it.

Some other interesting findings include:

• On an average visit, users read half the information only on those pages with 111 words or less.
• People spend some of their time understanding the page layout and navigation features, as well as looking at the images. People don't read during every single second of a page visit.
• On average, users will have time to read 28% of the words if they devote all of their time to reading. More realistically, users will read about 20% of the text on the average page

Nielsen has been interested in how users read on the web for a long time and he has determined that the truth is that people don't read very much, often scanning text instead of really reading it. His recent eyetracking studies validate this finding, as well.

Unlike with newspapers, books, magazines and other print media, it's not just images that distract people from fully digesting the web content they're reading. As social media users ourselves, we know how difficult it is to get through a long article when dealing with email notifications, pop-ups of new replies on Twitter, instant messages, not to mention that urge to check for the latest news in our RSS feeds.

Do Some People Have a Natural Info Processing Mechanism?

Given that the world of online readers have turned to scanning text to keep up with the constant flow of information, we wonder if some people are better than others at doing so. Are there people who have a natural ability to scan and process massive amounts of information, yet still be able to find the signal amongst the noise?

It's an interesting question to ponder, especially considering the conversations of late surrounding whether or not it's possible to truly understand, interact, and engage with others when taking in so much information.

For example, in Scoble's blog post where he explained why he was following 20,000 users on Twitter, he had people wondering how he could really keep up. After calculating how fast the tweets came in, Brian Sullivan wrote:

I know there are claims that Robert is a cyborg...so that seems not a plausible explanation. I think then that Robert's claim is somewhat suspect (of course his definition of "follow" may be different from mine -- or my math may be wrong)...Are you really "following" 20,000 on Twitter - at least in any real sense of the word "follow"?

Morgan wondered, "How can this type of information flow be beneficial to anyone?" But it was Elliott Ng, who wished for  "the same massive information processing gene as Robert Scoble."

Although meant perhaps jokingly, the question is valid. How do these people do it?

Our very own Marshall Kirkpatrick hinted at some of his tricks in his "7 Tips for Making the Most of Your RSS Reader post," claiming he doesn't worry about trying to read every item in his reader. Louis Gray, on the other hand, declares he never marks all as read. But everyone really needs to find their own balance when it comes to digesting the information they consume.

Do you read or do you just skim? What's your strategy for keeping up?

Here's Sean's full comment:

"My 'gut feeling' thoughts exactly...good to hear them supported with data!

I'm a great example of the digital native (though I haven't been a teen for some time, I was an early net adopter in the early 90's when I actually was a teen). Like you mentioned, I hardly ever read books. Probably only about one or two a year, and even then they're typically non-fiction as opposed to 'literature'. Magazines? Only during flights.

Despite that, I scored a perfect 6/6 GMAT writing score, and my while I forget the specific verbal vs. quantitative, my overall was in the 97th percentile.

Granted, one could argue I'm missing out on the cultural value associated with great literary works, however because I tend to lean toward heavier reading (quality news, science, etc) I don't think I'm missing out too much with regards to developing or maintaining my reading ability. And because of blogs, forums, and email, I probably write several dozen pages worth of text each week, which is probably more than many members of previous generations can claim!"