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 mo...