For Sale 3

Last year I bought a used iPad 2 for cheap on eBay with an eye to resell it and make a quick buck. I never actually got rid of it, though. That thing soon became my main reading device, probably because a book or kindle is too divorced from my ADHD-ridden techniques of information consumption. I originally used the app Instapaper to read long articles that caught my attention on the daily web grind. Then I discovered Longform for iPad. It’s a simple to use and well curated stream of long—as the name may infer—articles that are beautifully edited in one central app. It has quickly and naturally become my daily newspaper of choice as it easily builds on my personal feedreader habits. Besides this app I now only have a digital subscription to The Wire. Ingeniously, the developers of Longform have also found a loophole in the process of using content from magazines; a much discussed and highly controversial practice of content reprocessing. The workaround means that the app loads the actual web page which the article is taken from first, so the publishers still get their precious page impressions and ad revenue, as mentioned in this article on the New York Times blog.

You get all this for the affordable sum of €1.59 — or, in other words, about the price for a daily newspaper these days.

Published October 19, 2012.