What I Use: Reading (Premium)

I’ve always been a voracious reader, and these days I split my time reading—and listening—using various tablet and smartphone apps.

Hardware

Theoretically, an Amazon Kindle would be ideal for reading: these devices are eye-friendly and inexpensive, and they deliver several days of battery life. And I do purchase a lot of reading content—in print and audio form—from Amazon. But Kindle eBook readers have three flaws that, to me, are fatal: they are not compatible with all of the content that Amazon sells, they’re not in color, and they can’t handle a lot of the non-Kindle content that I read every day (see below). It’s hard to imagine Amazon fixing all of those issues, especially given that it has never once addressed the first two.

That leaves me with two choices: a smartphone or a tablet. And here, again, the choice was made for me. While I do of course read from time to time on my phone, and I listen to audiobooks semi-exclusively from my phone, smartphone displays are too small for my aging eyes to use for regular reading. (And I like to read before I go to sleep, and don’t want a phone next to the bed.)

So that whittles the choice down to a tablet. And when it comes to tablets, there is the iPad and literally nothing else. Yes, Google is working to fix that, via its “L” updates to Android and the promise of a future generation of more capable Android-based tablets. But we live in the today. And today, it’s just iPad.

There is the question of which iPad, of course. I’m currently using an iPad Air, which I like quite a bit thanks to its smaller bezels (and the resulting larger display), slick design, and USB-C compatibility. But had the new iPad mini been available when I was ready to upgrade, I would have gone with that: I feel like the iPad mini is the ideal-sized form factor for reading. That said, the iPad Air and mini are both expensive devices, and with the latest rumors about Apple adopting USB-C on its base model iPad, I could see going in that direction in the future too. But whatever. All of these things are iPads. And iPad is it in the tablet space today.

(Semi-related, I’m wondering if the iPad OS multitasking improvements that Apple announced at WWDC along with a rumored 14-inch iPad Pro will make this platform more viable for general-purpose computing too. But that’s another story.)

Software/services

My iPad is organized for consumption tasks, where my daily use case is reading, and I occasionally travel and would like to sometimes watch videos. That’s pretty much all I use it for. But I do use it a lot: I’ve always loved reading, and one of my earliest memories is of finding something to read while I ate a bowl of cereal as a child. I was delighted to discover comics in the newspaper that arrived at our house every day, and that quickly turned into me reading other parts of the paper as well. If there was nothing to read, I’d read whatever was on the cereal box.

Each morning, I go through the news in this exact order: The New York Times (Front Page and Most Popular only), The Washington Post (Top Stories only), Google News (Technology section only), and then the Google app (which is called the Google Discovery feed on Android).

The Google app/Discovery feed is my go-to for random reading throughout the day. This feed has been mostly fine-tuned over the year by me expressing my interest/disinterest in various topics and so there’s always something interesting to read. (And because it’s Google, there are sometimes crazy, non-relevant stories to sort out too, which can be humorous.)

At night, I check the Google app/Discovery feed, Pocket, and Medium, in that order. And don’t always make it to Medium.

I routinely save longer articles I want to read later to Pocket, and that selection, which is always available offline, is a nice thing to have when I’m traveling especially. And not every day, but every so often, I’ll look at Pocket’s Discover feed, which typically highlights high-quality, long-form articles to read.

Medium is … curious. It appears to be very popular with programmers and Apple enthusiasts, on the tech side, and that’s a lot of what I see there. But it’s also big with travel bloggers and some other topics I’m interested in. As with the Google Discovery feed, I sometimes am recommended things that make no sense. And I should mention that Medium is a paid service, so it may not be for everyone. But I keep renewing.

Finally, there’s the Kindle app. This is mostly about books, though I subscribe to the occasional periodical as well. I have purchased thousands of books from Kindle, and these days my downloaded selection is a curious mix of books about Mexico, history books, biographies, and fiction titles. For example, I’m working through “Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich” by Harold Jahner, “Paris: Life After the Liberation 1994-1949” by Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly” by Anthony Bourdain, “Devil in the White City” by Erik Larson for the first time. And I’m re-reading “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien and “’Salem’s Lot” by Stephen King, both for the umpteenth time.

Audiobooks

I rotate between audiobooks and podcasts on my phone at the gym, while driving, and while doing dishes and cleaning up at home. I use Audible for audiobooks, of course, and subscribe to Audible Premium Plus. Recent selections include “After Steve” by Tripp Mickle, “Build” by Tony Fadell, and “Unmasked” by Paul Holes, and I’m re-listening to “The Lost World” by Michael Crichton now.

I use Pocket Casts for podcasts, and I subscribe to about 18 tech podcasts, which run the gamut from tech (.NET Rocks, Behind the Tech with Kevin Scott, Internet History Podcasts, Run As Radio,) to travel (Amateur Traveler, Carry On, Live and Invest Overseas) to health/fitness (Maintenance Phase), history/current events (American History Tellers, American Scandal), music (Rolling Stone Music Now, The Full in Bloom Podcast), and more.