Marco Arment, writing a response to comparisons between the soon defunct The Daily and his new, seemingly successful The Magazine:

“Tablet-native” publishing shouldn’t mean any particular multimedia features or structures. True tablet-native publishing should mean using the freedom of modern platforms to break out of the idea that publications need to follow a universal mold. They’re all just software now, and a unified platform would only limit the possibilities.

There is no one way to do it right but perhaps what makes journalism (and all reading, really) exciting on the tablet is ignoring the legacies that came before and exploring the endless possibilities of building something for a brand new platform.

Travis Alber and Aaron Miller have written an excellent piece on the book as a social platform drawing from their experience building BookGlutton. They propose that books are—and have always been—a way to make connections; connections with ideas, with stories, and with others. Through the act of reading is often a solitary activity, from that interactions with others almost always occur:

It’s a lofty publisher who tries to look above the bottom line to ask the question: but how should books be read? And not only to ask that question, but to understand that it’s not merely a question of hardback or paperback, or Kindle vs. Nook. It’s not merely about whether a book will be an app, or whether it will be available in foreign territories simultaneous with its U.S. release. It’s not about Garamond vs. Bembo either, or the colophon or dedication, or who you can get to write the introduction. It’s not an experiential question at all; it’s entirely metaphysical, and it might even be better to start with the question: why do people read books?

We think there is a very simple but profound answer to that question: people read books to make connections. This can be considered at a cognitive level, through simple, repetitive pattern recognition, or at a conceptual, spiritual level. Either way, the basic work of the reader’s mind is to make connections, and the basic mode of higher thought is to exist both in and out of the physical world for a bit, drawing lines between the two.

A fantastic piece Leon Wieseltier on the the book as an object, libraries, and reading. One of my favorite parts:

There is something inhuman about the pristinity of digital publication. It lacks fingerprints. But the copy of a book that is on my shelf is my copy. It is unlike any other copy, it has been individuated; and even those books that I have not yet opened—unread books are an essential element of a library—were acquired for the further cultivation of a particular admixture of interests and beliefs, and every one of them will have its hour.

I was thinking about this on my way home last week. I’ve been reading The New Yorker on the my train rides to and from work and as I turned the page, I noticed my sweaty finger smudged the ink on the page, dirtying my hand. “That doesn’t happen when I read on my iPad,” I thought, “Sometimes print is still better.”

Peter Mendelsund adds his own thoughts on the piece, and books in general:

But this piece of writing will not, after all, become part “of my biography” the way physical texts do, as it will invariably vanish into the uncultivated, undifferentiated, un-curated part of my brain reserved for the mass of digital information, mediated by screens, that flows untrammeled through my fractured awareness almost every waking hour of every day (I’m not saying this particular article deserves to be preserved. I’m just using it as a case study). That is to say: I will forget it. It is not, and cannot be, mine in any lasting respect. Sure–this article can be saved, in the same way my photos and my music are saved, to my hard drive. But every last article I’ve abandoned to those digital archives, just like all of those jpgs and mp3s similarly consigned, has become like Indiana Jones’s lost ark: buried in an infinite warehouse of infinite treasures, never to be seen or heard from again.

And concludes with a touching realization:

I’ve determined that the way I can best incorporate a digital artifact into my continued existence, for lack of a physical analog, is to share it. (which is what I’m doing now). This is how I will hoard it: I will give it out, then field the reactions. The sharing is the mnemonic- the preserving agent.

It’s harder to incorporate a digital artifact into our lives. We don’t mark up the pages, dog-ear the corners, let the pages get bent and dirtied—we can’t make it our own. But perhaps, the one thing we can do to inject ourselves into this digital artifacts is to share it, to make sure the text lives with us, but also lives on past us.

Megan Garber muses over at The Atlantic that while the form of the book is changing, the way they are sold and experienced hasn’t really changed since Gutenberg. She argues that books will likely go the way of music and moves ala Spotify and Netflix and move to the cloud via subscription services. While I’m not necessarily sure this is the way I want to experience reading, I am fully behind her thoughts on how cloud computing will change everything:

The cloud is a powerful thing. And the revolution that’s taking place in computing overall — the computer as an object giving way to the computer as a service — is changing our approach to content consumption, as well. As more and more of our stuff moves to the cloud, and as the mechanism of stuff-storage shifts from the download to the stream, the membership-driven library seems more and more feasible. And more and more sensible. And more and more exciting.

I wrote a bit about this last year and I think we will be seeing this form of media consumption more and more.

bobulate:

Nico Muhley with an approach to reading:

[I] came across somebody’s blog, the first line of which was, “I decided not to read this when it came out.” What. Why would you take the time to write that you, on purpose, didn’t read something? What a strange impulse, and a strange thing to admit to; maybe it’s something in my makeup but it seems only polite to listen to every goddamn thing and read everything and don’t stop listening and reading and looking until you keel over in a pile of Belgian schmattas and headphones, and until that time, feel terribly guilty about not having read, listened, seen. I have a page on my phone that is devoted to things I need to read, things people have recommended to me. The principle is to go into everything wanting to like it. I read those Dan Brown books! The only reason I could see not to would be to make a terrible autobiographical point, and reading things with hatred in the heart is the opposite of fun, so I found a way in that felt like making the best of an airport bistro.

If we go into everything seeing good, seeing possibility in those airport bistros, boingo wifi, saying ‘yes and,’ what might be possible? It’s the ‘wanting to like it principle.’

Mandy Brown on a web designed for reading from the Readabilty blog.

[P]eople do read online. They read more than they ever did. They even read long articles, and straight to the end. They read one article after the other. They crave reading in the quiet moments of the day—waiting in line for coffee, riding the bus, enjoying a glass of wine before their date arrives at the bar. They read while walking down the street; they read at their desk in between tasks; they buy devices that permit them to carry more words than they ever could before—and with those devices in hand they read more and more.

Who says this isn’t an exciting era for the written word? What’s interesting is that the web, at its core, is designed for quick consumption, not long-form journalism. But we don’t have to choose between one or the other, between the longer, thoughtful pieces and the shorter, ad-driven sites. The web’s big enough for all of it.

Lois Beckett reports on Gerald Marzorati, former editor for New York Times Magazine and his thoughts on long-form journalism online:

We have metrics at The New York Times that show that people absolutely click the 23 clicks through to the end of the story. When I was at the magazine, the longest pieces in the magazine were the best-read, the most-read, the most-emailed. The pieces also tended to be, at the end of the year, the pieces that got the most pageviews of anything the Times ran…. People figured out their own sorts of behavior. They printed out the story — on the subway, you would see a printed-out version. Or Instapaper. People are reading these things, and they still become conversation pieces. I don’t know how many of you read Larry Wright’s [New Yorker] piece on Scientology, but a lot of people have read that piece…. [That] you can comment on them, you can blog about them, actually brings more readers to these long-form pieces.

The future is exciting. It’s like Gutenberg all over again.

(And, for the record, that Scientology piece Marzorati mentions is worth reading. One of my favorite things I’ve read online recently.)

Craig Mod on how to improve the state of eBooks:

• Read voraciously and on every device within reach.
• Take copious notes on the device.
• Take copious notes about the device.
• Take your eBooks on adventures.
• Read while traveling.
• On trains, in planes, on the backs of elephants, by the beach.
• What about the experience delights?
• And, to a lesser degree, what annoys? (But try to focus on delight.)
• Do not feel compelled to scale your map 1:1 with print.
• Write.
• Consider how you write.
• Get a typewriter and write on that.
• Now try writing the same thing on a computer.
• Now get a wonderful pen and write longhand.
• Wax on. Wax off. As it were.
• Try to publish something, anything with a traditional publisher.
• Publish on a blog for a while.
• Think about those processes.

To improve eBooks we understand how they work and how they affect us, both in production and consumption:

It’s an intimacy with these systems for which you should aim. And have fun — you’re spelunking into the cobwebbed caves of the minds of your beloved authors. Into the shadowy recesses behind the words. To tread the same paths, use the same tools as did they. It should give you greater insight into the works produced with those certain tools, within the constraints of those certain publishing mechanisms.

The medium is the message and all that.