Reading on the iPad Part 7: Fast Company: applying my WSJ reading habits

Recently Fast Company magazine offered me a sweet deal to try them out. In spite of trying to cut down on subscriptions, I decided to investigate whether Fast Company could replace one of my existing subscriptions, or provide new insights without adding significantly to my reading load. I find the magazine a fun read. But I do have to be ruthless in my subscription management.

There is no Fast Company app for the iPad. Utilizing the table of contents and full article offerings of the fastcompany.com web site, I've found I can read it quickly and usefully following the same workflow I use for The Wall Street Journal:

• Read the summaries in the table of contents, 
• open the articles I desire in background tabs.

I have chosen to err on the side of missing a tasty tidbit and not following links with insufficient justification up front. I think I'd prefer a qmags.com style interface if one were available. But for now, "dispatch from table of contents" works well enough.

This concludes a very brief part 7.  Let's go right on to Reading on the iPad Part 8: Boston Business Journal: Generic trounces clever!

Reading on the iPad Part 8: Boston Business Journal: Generic trounces clever!

A one year experiment reading the Boston Business Journal is coming to an end for me. BBJ is a fine publication, but I am letting my subscription run out without renewing, following a useful keep/cancel criterion I found in The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. In Chapter 6, "The Low-Information Diet," he says:

It is imperative that you learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable. Most are all three.

I've paraphrased this into a question to ask myself as I pick up each new issue of a magazine, "Can I point to an article containing at least one significant idea that is relevant, or important to what I'm doing these days in a way that changes what I do?"

With Fast Company, the answer is "yes" from every issue. But for the things I'm doing right now, the answer is a weekly "no" from the Boston Business Journal. That said, it remains fine publication with lots of information that may become relevant to me in the future.

This experiment gave me the opportunity to try out reading The Boston Business Journal on the iPad using a different method from any of the other publications: The iBooks PDF reader.

Like many of the other publications I've mentioned, The Boston Business Journal offers paper-edition subscribers online access to the full content in various forms. There is actually a multi-tiered offering with limited digital access to everyone, or low-cost access to most content, or a premium subscription that offers everything from the print edition and more. My one-year experiment was a premium subscription at a bargain price offered as a promotion.

Every week I received email that announced the new issue and contained links to article highlights and my online subscription page. The subscription page contained links to the most recent five issues as "View Online" or "View PDF". Interestingly, if you tap "View Online" you get an error message:

Unfortunately iPhone and iPad devices do not support flash,

which is used by our current digital edition. To read your

digital edition, use the same URL on any laptop or PC

device.

For information about non-flash solutions, namely mobile

Smartphone applications, which are compatible with iPhone

and iPad devices, please visit

http://pagesuite.com/Smartphone.aspx. To understand

whether your digital edition will be available as a

Smartphone application, please contact the publisher

directly.

That turns out to be a rather silly and un-helpful error message. If you follow the link, you land at a web page clearly intended for magazine publishers interested in establishing a business relationship to create an iPad app for their publication.

If, instead you go back and tap on "View PDF" instead of "View Online", a very usable verbatim rendering of the entire publication loads into Safari, and a control bar appears at the top of the page offering additional options for viewing. That control bar vanishes pretty quickly, but if you tap in the top half inch of the page, it comes back. When you tap on "Open in iBooks" you're switched over to the iBooks reader which offers precisely the kind of nice interface one gets from qmags.com, or the iPad apps for Wired or The Economist.

The interface is most similar to the qmags.com app. You get a bit-for-bit rendering of the paper edition which sometimes takes a moment to scale and render into an in-focus page. There is a thumbnail view at the bottom, but I like the qmags.com thumbnail view better because the icons are bigger. There is no linking within the document. The qmags.com edition of IEEE Spectrum offers rudimentary, but very helpful links:  article access from the table of contents, skipping to the continuation of an article from the "Continued on page xxx" link, and a return to where you left off in the main body of the publication from the "Continued from page yyy" link. No such links are present in the PDF edition of the Boston Business Journal and I miss them.

Although the PDF iBooks interface to the Boston Business Journal is rudimentary, it scores pretty well against my basic evaluation criteria.

• My need is for a "turn all the pages" interface, and that's what is provided.
• The table of contents is the same as the print edition. It doesn't do anything extra, but unlike Forbes, it doesn't do any extra work that creates problems.
• The rendering is not immediate, but it's fast enough. It takes about the same amount of time to wait for full rendering as it would for me to turn a physical page. It's no better than print, but no worse.
• The interface is sensible and obvious with a small bar at the top with controls and navigation aids.

I would very much like to try out an issue of The Wall Street Journal as a plain PDF file in iBooks. I suspect I'd find it much more comfortable and usable than the existing WSJ iPad app. Such a rendering might be usable enough to return me to the "turn all the pages and let my eye work with the typography" approach.

This concludes my 8-part blog posting, Reading on the iPad. Thank you for taking the time to read it. If I may make a mercenary pitch:  If you enjoyed the article, and would like to encourage me to write more, please click on an ad, or visit my Cafe Press store, and buy some swag with a Poetnerd one-liner.

Reading on the iPad Part 6: Forbes was a disappointment.

The July 18, 2010 issue of Forbes contains an editorial that lays out big changes happening at Forbes to embrace the digital world: The new Forbes web site offers more up-to-date information outside the print cycle. The new tools inside of Forbes for content creation allow richer content creation for staff, and embraces contributions from the outside in the form of blogs and feedback postings. The pages of Forbes now contain articles with significant commentary from outside. From that editorial, and a thread of commentary through a couple issues, I built up high expectations of what the online Forbes experience would be. I was disappointed.

There seems to be a basic assumption that all this new online input comes from a baseline of reading the paper edition. Although the entire content of the print edition is available on the web site, it is again on offer as a table of contents with links to articles. As with other general interest glossy magazines, I found I really wanted to turn the pages, not dispatch from the table of contents. It also seemed that Forbes on the web crammed too many overly intrusive ads into its presentation. It was quite distracting.

There is no Forbes app for the iPad. It was with hopeful anticipation that I investigated the Forbes Kindle subscription. Unfortunately, I pretty much hated everything about the experience of Forbes for Kindle on the iPad.

The beautiful glossy magazine had been ground down into a cheap paperback book. The pages shrank down to 3x6 inches and the typography was reduced to a single font in only a couple point sizes. Colorful icons and graphical navigational aids were eliminated and everything re-formatted into block paragraphs. But as if to comply with a marketing directive to be able to say, "We offer color!" a very few select photographs were retained as "color plates" scattered throughout.

There was one difference between Forbes for the iPad Kindle app that made it less usable than a paperback book: With a paperback book, you can start at the first page, and flip through all the pages. You CANNOT do that with Forbes for Kindle. You must choose an article from the table of contents. When you get to the end of the article, you can continue to other articles in the same section, but when you're through all the Features, or all the Lifestyle articles, you hit a wall and must return to the table of contents and choose another article starting point.

Worst of all, the table of contents is complete re-arrangement of the print edition organized by article priority. Feature articles appear first, then other sections and lastly is the Editorial section. This is an interesting approach conceptually, but is totally at odds with my well-established habits of travel through the print edition. I liked reading the editorial content early, then the short articles to get me limbered up for the more detailed features which I would read last, with "Thoughts" as desert.  Instead, everything is in the opposite order, under unfamiliar section headings in the table of contents, with the editorials at the end smooshed together on top of "Thoughts".

I'm so glad the subscription came with a 15 day full-refund guarantee.  I asked for my refund after 15 minutes.

I think Forbes would be extremely well served if it discontinued offering a Kindle subscription and switched over to using qmags.com. Everything that is good about the typography and organization of Forbes would be retained. The experience would be the same as or better than the experience of turning the pages of the print edition.

This concludes part 6. Let's move on to Reading on the iPad Part 7: Fast Company: applying my WSJ reading habits.

Reading on the iPad Part 5: outsourcing to qmags works well!

I belong to a couple professional societies, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).  This section describes the good experience I had with the IEEE's outsourced publication, IEEE Spectrum, and my experience with the ACM publication, and why I advocate it switch to the IEEE's approach of outsourcing to a third party qmags.com.

The IEEE

The IEEE has been exploring a couple different approaches to online viewing. It offers a tremendous number of publications via the web, and has invested heavily in their Xplore digital library. The primary interface for these publications is article search or a table of contents web page containing links to the articles in various formats including PDF and HTML.

For the narrow-cast publications within the various IEEE societies, I think this makes sense. My subscriptions are to Spectrum, the IEEE publication for more general audiences, and Computer the general-audience-directed publication of the IEEE Computer Society. My reading of these two magazines doesn't work with the "dispatch from table of contents" model.

Happily, the IEEE offers selected publications with an iPad app with a "flip all the pages" interface through a third party, qmags.com. Each publication comes as a separate app that offers a bookshelf of the available issues and an interface similar to what I found for The Economist and Wired. By my evaluation criteria, it ranks quite high:

• It is a "turn all the pages" interface.
• The table of contents is a sensible refinement of that from the print edition.
• The pages render quickly and are almost always visible and in focus immediately.
• The interface is sensible and obvious with a small bar at the top with controls and navigation aids.

The qmags.com app seems to be a generic viewer that displays a bit-for-bit rendering of the actual magazine page images. This means that sometimes there is a brief delay as the page is scaled and rendered. In practice this doesn't happen too often. It's actually kind of fun getting my fingers and my eyes working together to flip through, zoom in and out, and to read through. I believe this is the way reading on a tablet should be.

The qmags.com app provides a thumbnail view that allows overview and quick access to distant pages. I think this interface is less clever and actually more intuitive than the scrollbar interface offered by the apps for The Economist and Wired.

One other nice feature of how qmags.com has the business set up: I get email alerting me to the existence of the new issues. Perhaps that is available for Wired and The Economist, but I haven't figured out how to turn it on.

To my way of thinking, publishers should try out qmags.com and see if it works for them rather than developing and supporting an application in-house. I'd be interested in trying out The Wall Street Journal with this interface, although I suspect that the page size is too big, and there would be too many zoom in/zoom out operations in the course of reading.

CACM: A candidate for qmags.com

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), like the IEEE has made a huge investment in their online library. As with the IEEE, the ACM digital library offers article search, and the "dispatch from the table of contents" interface. Additionally, for their general interest publication, Communications of the ACM (CACM), members can log onto the web site, and use the "Digital Edition" link to get to a fast and powerful interface implemented in JavaScript. This interface provides a bit-for-bit rendering of the magazine's page images, enhanced with links, quite similar to the experience of the qmags.com interface.

For reading CACM on my desktop computer which is always connected at high speed to the Internet, this combination of interfaces works quite well. I can flip pages or I can grab an article at a time. For the iPad, these interfaces are definitely sub-optimal because:

1. I use the "flip all the pages," not the "dispatch from table of contents" as my primary mode of reading it. (Just as I do with the IEEE's general-audience publications.)
2. The pages are NEVER on screen and ready to read when I ask for them. Instead, every page turn triggers a page download and time consuming scaling to render. When I go back to a previous page, no cache is kept so the page is again downloaded and rendered.

I have suggested to the ACM Member Services Department that they give serious consideration to adopting qmags.com for CACM.

This concludes part 5.  On to the next part: Reading on the iPad Part 6: Forbes was a disappointment.

Examine Disney for insight on the future of Apple

The news wires are abuzz today with speculation on the future of Apple. Stepping down as CEO, Steve Jobs has made a little more real, the inevitability of his ultimate departure.

Some believe that the death of Steve Jobs means the death of Apple. Others, who view themselves as pragmatic realists foresee a bland and boring future for a company that will lose its defining spark, and its ultimate shepherd. Apple and its customers are widely described as in the thrall of the "Cult of Steve". What will happen when Steve is gone?

I find an interesting model for the future in Disney. Like Apple, Disney was founded by a visionary who saw the world's favorite play space where others saw just a swamp. Remember that construction of Walt Disney World, a property that defined the Disney company going forward, was begun the year after Walt's death. (Somewhere out in The Net is the account of Walt pushing through the planning for Disney World from his hospital bed. When I find it, I'll link to it here.)

It should be reassuring to Apple customers and stockholders that, unlike Disney, Apple got the chance to explore life without their visionary. At that time, the accepted wisdom was that Apple could only succeed by breaking with the approach of "that crazy Steve Jobs". Steve's return showed how to hew to his vision, come back from behind and change the world with unimagined levels of success.

A decade ago, David Pogue wrote In Praise of Corporate Tyranny for Macworld. Will Apple maintain focus without Steve Jobs to crack the whip, and reset expectations and behavior?

When the founding visionary goes, those left behind must imagine a way forward guided by belief. Instead of the unpleasant but simple intervention by the Tyrant, there will need to be discussion and consensus building. It will not be efficient, but it can achieve greatness. Jim Collins in Good to Great documents know companies guided by a common vision can go farther than those operated by "one great man with a thousand assistants".

Disney, with the common theme of "What would Walt do?" exploits and refines a cult of personality into great experiences for guests and excellent profits for stockholders. I expect that Apple will do the same. Those who disagree would do well to review Disney's history.

Epilogue:  5 October 2018.

25 August 2011, when I wrote this post, Apple stock closed at $53.39.

The first iPad was a year and a half old.

There was no Apple watch.

Today Apple stock closed at 227.99.  According to a CAGR calculator I found on the web, that's a compound annual growth rate of 19.9%.

This time, it appears I was right. And I put my money where my mouth was, so I reaped the benefits of my convictions for a change. YAY!

Reading on the iPad Part 4: Extreme disappointment: The Wall Street Journal.

The Wall Street Journal set an impressive milestone when it maintained and expanded online readership after putting most of the content behind a pay wall. Perhaps others were driven to the online-only subscription as I was when the print subscription price doubled. At any rate, the online Wall Street Journal does a pretty good job of offering all the content of the print edition as well as additional, more up-to-date content on "internet time."

I've read The Wall Street Journal every day since 1986 or so. I began by reading it like a book -- studying every word of most articles to understand the basics of business and business news. Over the years I evolved a ritual of flipping all the pages, and letting my eye work together with the typography to get what I wanted about the relevant business, world, and national stories currently in play.

When I switched to the online WSJ, I had to radically change my ritual. It was too time consuming to flip through every article. However the web site, for each section of the paper, provided an excellent table of contents. I settled into a comfortable triage and selection ritual, opening the articles in background tabs so that they would download and render while I finished the current table of contents. Thus I took explicit control to enable the content to be on screen when I wanted, maintaining smooth workflow.
When I went to The Wall Street Journal iPad application, I was hopeful that I could establish an even more efficient flow, because the whole issue would be loaded in and cached on the iPad.

Sadly, I found the WSJ iPad experience to be like trying to read a newspaper through a peep hole via remote manipulation, as one might work with radioactive isotopes. The iPad app gives you a transformed image of every page. The articles are placed on the page in the same place they appear in the paper edition, but since the "paper" is six inches by eight inches instead of 29 by 23 inches, the article text is truncated. The truncation almost always happens in the middle of a sentence. Although I get more text than I would find in the summary entry on the Web site, I am left less sure of whether or not I want to read the article. I suspect a subtle aspect of human factors is at work -- the brain's craves completion when offered half a sentence makes it more difficult to skip the follow-up and move on.

In fairness, I can see how this was an interesting attempt to transform a typographically useful layout onto a radically smaller a display area. Unfortunately I found the experience extremely unpleasant. I had to go back to flipping through every page of the paper, but my flow was interrupted by having to tap on articles I would not have ordinarily read in order to feel comfortable moving on.

Increasing the unpleasantness, the WSJ iPad app uses a unique gesture to return from following an article. Everywhere else on an iPad, the pinch gesture shrinks the image. In the WSJ iPad article, it means, "Close" the article you were reading and go back to what you were doing before.

Such a "Close" gesture is really quite clever. It pretty much means what it is, and it is a reasonable paradigm for returning from a diversion into an article. There are two problems with it: The pinch gesture is already established as another behavior and there is a quarter century of experience with a thing called a "Back" button.

So, in spite of the great effort made by Dow Jones & Company, I find myself going back to the web browser for my daily read of The Wall Street Journal. On the iPad this has a couple additional consequences: I will not be able to read the WSJ offline. This downside is somewhat reduced by my viewing a fairly small number of articles that are only kilobytes in size. Easily accommodated by the cellular network.

I will not be using Safari to read it until Safari offers tabbed browsing. I spent the $0.99 for Atomic Browser so that I can "Open Page in Background Tab" just like I do on my desktop. However, Atomic Browser's extreme aversion to any pop-ups, means that photos that are shown with a pop up simply do not work and I need an additional link to re-log in when the WSJ server has expired my session keys. (This seems to happen more frequently than I would expect, once every couple days rather than every couple of weeks.)

Recognizing the challenge of a faithful typographical rendition on the small iPad form factor I would suggest the following amendments to the iPad app for The Wall Street Journal:

• Provide a navigation and control bar as the apps for The Economist and Wired do.
• Put a "Back" button on that control bar, and get rid of the "Close" gesture.
• Make every subset article end on a sentence, or ideally, a paragraph boundary.
• Offer the multiple sectional table of contents access mechanism copied in from the web version.

These changes are applying lessons learned from the successful apps: Make navigation explicit, and tune up the table of contents for online viewing.

For now, I classify the iPad app for The Wall Street Journal as "too clever in ways that significantly degrade usability."

This concludes part 4. Continue with Reading on the iPad Part 5: outsourcing to qmags works well!.

Reading on the iPad Part 3: My Favorites

My Favorite: The Economist

As far as I can tell, The Economist works the hardest to offer extremely usable content in a variety of non-traditional formats all at no extra charge to subscribers to the print edition.The economist.com web site offers a high quality mix of online discussions, immediate news stories, links to the print edition, and links to other formats. Following the Digital & mobile link near the top of the page brings you to the page where you can download apps for Kindle, iPhone, iPad and Android that offer the full content of the print edition, as well as apps that offer other classes of content. Additionally, word-for-word audio transcription is available either as a podcast, a zip file with mp3's of the entire issue, or individual sections in a zip file.

The Economist is my favorite magazine. If I had to pick from all my subscriptions a single one to retain, it would be The Economist. I like it because it covers world events from a high level and local events in several countries and world regions. It contains rigorous analysis and tutorials on events viewing them from the perspective of economics. When Leavitt and Dubliner published Freakonomics, I was already a receptive audience, having worked through such a perspective as a long-time reader of The Economist. Additionally The Economist presents current events in Science, Technology, Books and The Arts. The Science & Technology section has only a few articles, but they're the important ones that you eventually hear about everywhere else. Finally, there is the Obituary where one learns about people, sometimes famous, often obscure who made a big difference in the world.

With all this content, for a very long time, I was terribly backlogged with The Economist. I could never finish one before the next weekly issue would arrive. That is, until I put the word-for-word audio edition into my car and began listening while driving. I include all this detail to show how the iPad app so perfectly fits my needs when reading and listening to The Economist. Every Friday, I open the iPad app, see the new issue on offer and tap "Download" to bring it onto the iPad. Inside the issue, I tap on an icon of headphones to download the entire word-for-word audio edition.

I flip through the pages scanning the articles for the quick factual updates on news stories, the alternate perspective on world and somewhat local events. As I do that, I pick out which audio articles I'll play in the car. Even with this triage and filtering, I still find there's a whole week's worth of driving that's covered by the audio edition.

By the criteria I set in the previous section the iPad app for The Economist is a home run:

• I want a "turn all the pages" interface, and the app offers it. Unlike the Wall Street Journal iPad app, (see below), the iPad app for The Economist does an excellent job of translating the print edition usefully into a subtly different format for consumption on the iPad.
• I don't want a special summary in the table of contents, and I don't get one. I get a table of contents laid out similarly to the print edition, with the articles grouped by section, but the sections organized in the same order as they appear as one flips the pages. (This is something I wish all the other iPad and web editions would do.)
• After downloading the issue, the content is all right there when I want it. Of particular note is how the app sensibly renders content so there there is no delay waiting for the page to be scaled and imaged. (This is a problem for most PDF-based renderings.) I found that I could flip the pages in the iPad app faster than I could flip pages in the paper edition, and that resulted in my being able to read more in less time. This experience was often the case with the iPad editions.
• The interface is indeed familiar, sensible and obvious. I particularly like how there's a little bar at the top with controls and navigation aids. The only negative here is that the controls for the audio edition playback fade away on a timeout, not with a gesture. This becomes annoying when I need to pause the audio playback when the iPad has put the display to sleep.

From the standpoint of usability, quality of execution, and business model, the experience of reading/listening to The Economist is first rate. It is the best of the best.

A close second: Wired

Wired too offers an iPad app, rather than deferring to a more generic interface. Like the iPad app for The Economist, one starts the app, and taps to download the current issue.Early adopters of the iPad app for Wired complained that the file size of the magazine was unreasonably large. Apparently subsequent refinement has reduced the file size. At the present time a 500 megabyte book or magazine isn't a problem for me, but it is something others might care about.

There are many other similarities between the interfaces of the iPad apps for Wired and The Economist:

• There is a "turn all the pages" interface.
• The table of contents is a sensible refinement of that from the print edition.
• Content is on screen when I ask for it without a wait. As with The Economist, there is a re-rendering for the iPad form factor that displays quickly, and is readable.
• The interface is sensible and obvious with a small bar at the top with controls and navigation aids.

Wired adds:

• An article overview grid, with the articles arranged horizontally, and the pages of the articles arranged vertically.
• A scrollbar that allows you to zoom through the whole issue. This works by showing a couple of small-sized images of the pages as an inset on the screen as you slide the scrollbar. When you stop sliding, the main page changes to what was on display in the inset.
• Multi-media enhancements to articles and ads. This takes the form of videos that jump out at you when you visit particular ads, and interactive figures. Some will consider these enhancements gratuitous. I'll call them "mostly harmless".

Wired doesn't offer an audio transcription like The Economist does. I believe not offering it was a reasonable tradeoff. The Economist consists of lot of text and a only few diagrams that often can be described verbally. Wired is more of an experience of article with pictures and diagrams designed to enhance. This narrative with media approach is why I'm willing to cut Wired slack over whether or not the media enhancements add value.

I also noticed that Wired doesn't allow you to resize the text with the pinch/spread gesture like the Economist interface does. This generally isn't a problem because the rendered fonts are reasonably large.

One criticism I will make of Wired: The business model is evolving and currently contains a dis-incentive to go paperless. Wired generously provides the iPad edition to all subscribers to the print edition. Because I'm a long-time Wired subscriber, I get my print edition at significantly lower cost than the $19.99 per year that is the current rate for the iPad edition.

In fairness, we have to wait for customers voting with their feet to either adopt or abandon different offerings in the marketplace. Some, perhaps those inside Wired, may see the media enhancements as worth demanding a premium over the print edition price. Personally, I see production as a cost common to both online and print editions, but fabrication (printing on paper) and distribution (postage) to be significant additional costs.

I believe I should pay less to receive bits and not kill trees, because Wired doesn't have to print and mail the thing to me. For the time being, I'm receiving the print edition and recycling it (or giving it to a friend) while I do my actual reading of Wired on my iPad. It is my hope that the dis-incentive will go away with a lowering of the cost of the iPad edition, not an uplift to the cost of the print edition.

This concludes part 3. Continue with Reading on the iPad Part 4: Extreme disappointment: The Wall Street Journal.