Apps are only incidentally software; software is an implementation detail. Instead, apps are experiences.

Design an experience. Make it as beautiful - and as emotionally resonant - as it can possibly be. Then adorn the core experience and content with only as much functionality as is absolutely necessary. Functionality - and software-based thinking in general - is like seasoning. A little is an enhancement; any more destroys the flavour, subsumes the artistry of the chef, and may well be bad for you.

These new classes of devices, so immediately personal and portable and tactile, aren’t desktop-era shrines demanding incantation and prostration. They’re empowering extensions to our real, actual lives - and that’s a profound thing. They take what was once prosaic or mundane, and give us just a taste of superpowers. They’re augmentations, and they should be beautiful.

The more I use my iPad the more I like the size of it, the quality of the screen, the ability to immerse myself in whatever I'm doing. My iPhone feels small now in comparison, it feels hard to use and a lot of apps feel cluttered. After a few days away with just an iOS device I find a desktop based OS, either MacOs or Windows just a bit too distracting - too many things vying for my attention - too busy. I, like Matt, like Instapaper on iOS. It is simple, it doesn't distract me with unnecessary options there isn't a lot to learn to get the most out of it, it just gets out the way and allows me to focus on the article I wanted to read.

If I’m reading a piece of really long fiction, I often find that there are these fabulous things I want to remember. I want to take notes on it, so I highlight it, and if I have a thought about it, I’ll type it out quickly. Then I dump all these clippings into a format that I can look at later. In the case of War and Peace, I actually had 16,000 words worth of notes and clippings at the end of it. So I printed it out as a print-on-demand book. In short, I have a physical copy of all of my favorite parts of War and Peace that I can flip through, with my notes, but I don’t actually own a physical copy of War and Peace.

Since getting my kindle I have annotated a lot, and wrote an AppleScript to get my highlights and annotations out of the text file they're stored in, and into a text file per book. These are stored on my Dropbox folder, and I refer to them from time to time. Usually when I want to remember some partially remembered detail. I'm quite taken with the idea of getting them printed out though.

But what if your local bookstore, or hell, your local drugstore, had a print-on-demand machine that cost $10,000, and you want the print book, and they say, “Oh yeah, come by in three minutes, it’ll be ready.”

This is exactly what happened at the Lonely Planet shop in Sydney Airport - we bought a custom created guide to Tokyo and had it printed whilst we waited. It wasn't an elaborate print service - it was actually just an A4 laser printer - but it served its purpose well.

One of the reasons people like the Kindle is that it’s a single-purpose device, so you’re not tempted to check your email. I do think the problem of distractions on devices is real — because they are horribly designed. A desktop environment is just wretched. It’s an ergonomic catastrophe. If you look back at the early proponents of ubiquitous computing, they don’t talk about staring at one screen — they talk about screens lying around like papers lying around. And you’d use one and throw it away. They’d almost be disposable.

how much should be put online for free? And when? But I don't think those are the right questions. It's not about content being free or not, it's about content existing or not. Can I point? No? Then it's kinda not really there. At least not in the way we now expect. Undeniably, it's certainly not doing the work it could be doing.

Primarily this is why I just cancelled my The Week subscription. There was a frustrating technical difficulty as well (since a recent upgrade it had stopped remembering where I'd got to and permanently told me there was a new issue), but I figured they'd sort that out in time.

The only way I had to share content was to email it. This meant emailing the entire article, and finding a way to highlight, or point at, the bit that was relevant to the person I was sending it to. I email links to articles to my friends a lot (sorry friends!), to point them at it, and share what I think about it, or just to show them something I think they'll like. I'm pointing here in this blog post, pointing at the bit of the article about pointing :-). This is something that is important to me.

So, despite having enjoyed the content, and arguably been a bit more informed about the world in general, I've given up my subscription of The Week due to the lack of pointability!

Books also feel apposite for this form of content production. My intent was never to make books, not really to repurpose these links at all. And yet now, at the end of each year, a book can spring into life – built up not through direct intent, but one link at a time over a year. There’s something satisfying about producing an object instantly, even though its existence is dependent on a very gradual process.

I like this a lot. I've still got an itch to take my momento data from last year and do something physical book based with it. I might have to check out some of the tools mentioned here and see how I get on.

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience.

An interesting article that has elicited a lot of comments (134 at time of posting), some in agreement, some in disagreement.

My take on this subject is still that there are times and places for all types of reading equipment - electronic or paper or papyrus scroll for that matter. The illuminated manuscripts, for instance, I am glad to have seen first hand in analogue form so that I was able to see the slight variations in the calligraphy, to appreciate the shimmer of the gold leaf etc. However, the copy of the technical manual that allows me to quickly search for the keyword I'm after, produced by a company that allows me to download different versions of the book - so I can use it on my kindle, or on iBooks, or in whatever format my next eReader reads - is just as valuable.

From actual bookmarks to photographs, ticket stubs, lists, scribbled recipes, children’s drawings, birth certificates, four-leaf-clovers, unsent love letters, and countless other funny, heartbreaking, and odd ephemera, this scrapbook of Popek’s most intriguing finds opens a rare window into the private lives of anonymous strangers through snippets of their life stories.

Something about this really appeals. Recording the stuff found inside books, against the books, and then letting the books go on their merry journey onwards to have new bookmarks left in them.

We took our third book, Composition No. 1, in all its 150 loose and self-contained pages glory and married that up with 150 brilliantly keen Reader Outlouders. The idea was simple: each Reader Outlouder read out a different page from the book. And each Reader Outlouder was asked to read from a different spot in the museum (galleries, stairs, corridors, even the National Art Library). And the thousands of Friday Late visitors were given the chance to have the full book read out loud to them in whichever order they fancied.

Something about this sounds wonderful. I like the idea that you could mooch around the museum, stop to listen to a self-contained page being read, then move on to look at some exhibits before stopping to listen to another page being read.

Physical books are currently too cheap and too numerous. Publishers seem to churn out paperbacks like battery hens laying eggs. But who’s going to buy a paperback when you’ve got a Kindle, Kobo or iPad? The airport bookshop is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet. But that doesn’t mean that physical books are dead too. A bibliophile’s bookshelves speak of who they are more clearly than any collection of CDs, records or DVDs. However, finding space on those bookshelves is ever more tricky. ‘The Da Vinci Code’? On your Kindle. ‘Bridget Jones’? Kindle. These days, shelves are reserved for unusual, beautiful books – books, we hope, like ours. ‘One For The Trouble’ costs £30 – a premium price for a premium book that just begs to be taken down, weighed in your hand and thumbed through.

and

One of the most striking features in this new wave of high-quality books produced by smaller presses is the renewed focus on illustrations. Pictures have been largely absent from the adult reading experience for the past 50 years, although this was hardly the case 50 years before that, when readers expected visual nudges as to what Scrooge saw when he was confronted by the Christmas ghosts or how Tom and Maggie clutched each other as they went down together at the end of The Mill on the Floss

Two articles, similar themes: eBooks are dominating the reading landscape, but people sometimes want to do more than just read a book, they want to hold the book, share the book, pass it around their friends - the physical object gains additional meaning. To do so, means making sure that the book is a beautiful thing, a well printed, well bound article that deserves shelf space.

There are few things more wonderful than the smell of a much-loved book.

I love the smell of books, not just old ones, but new ones too. However, I'm not entirely sure that I want to smell that way. I'm quite liking the idea of the home spray mind you.