What would a dedicated blog reader look like?

Jason Kot­tke wrote a nice con­cur­ring post (at least I think it was con­cur­ring!) to my look at single-use and call for integrated-use read­ing devices. Then in a follow-up, he expanded on his posi­tion that the cor­rect sin­gle use [for an e-reader] isn’t buy­ing and read­ing books, but READING, in all its forms:

I do a *ton* of read­ing, upwards of 100–150 pages a day when I’m work­ing full-time. About 0.5% of those pages are from books. But the Kin­dle? I tried it and didn’t like it. The screen is still great…the rest of it didn’t work at all for me. And this is what is frus­trat­ing for me…the Kin­dle seemed right for buy­ing books but not for what I want it for: read­ing all that other stuff. I know the func­tion­al­ity exists on these devices to read blogs, mag­a­zines, news­pa­pers, etc., but they’re mar­keted as book read­ers (Arment even calls them “ebook read­ers” instead of “e-readers”), the user expe­ri­ence is opti­mized for book read­ing, and the com­pa­nies (esp. Ama­zon and B&N) view them as portable bookstores.

Like Jason, any kind of single-use read­ing machine is pretty far from MY ideal solu­tion. But I can imag­ine that it can be an ideal solu­tion for some peo­ple. I don’t really need a ded­i­cated dig­i­tal cam­era any­more, but that’s partly because I’m at best an occa­sional pho­tog­ra­pher. The first (and last) per­son I rec­om­mended the Kin­dle to was my grand­mother, whose read­ing of blogs and comic books is (ahem) light. I’d also rec­om­mend a Jit­ter­bug cell phone to her. Me, I’ve got an iPhone.

Like Jason, too, a big chunk of what I read are blogs. If you add other online peri­od­i­cals (whether web-only like Slate or web ver­sions of mags like the Atlantic), we’re prob­a­bly talk­ing 60–70% of my total page count. I read a lot more books than Jason, because I’m a freak­ing lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sor — and still, books don’t begin to dom­i­nate, let alone exhaust, my reading.

But when I think about test cases for the myth­i­cal integrated-media read­ing machine of the future, I almost never think of blogs. Children’s books, comic books (and strips), text­books, maps, pam­phlets, restau­rant menus, gro­cery store coupons — these are the text/image hybrids that I think 1) push the lim­its of what the Kin­dle can do and 2) are actu­ally more cen­tral to the every­day expe­ri­ence of “read­ing” than full-length books. And I can start to think about how read­ing machines and read­ing soft­ware can best be designed and employed to per­form those acts of reading.

But blogs? Is there a device, a soft­ware setup, a pur­chas­ing and sub­scrip­tion sys­tem, or deliv­ery and com­ment­ing and repost­ing mech­a­nisms, that are opti­mized for read­ing blogs — above and beyond what cur­rent exists for our PCs, lap­tops, and smart phones?

Maybe this isn’t really a prob­lem. Blogs are web pages, and even though we haven’t fig­ured out a good way for E-Ink devices or cheap cel­lu­lar phones to dis­play HTML, we’ve kind of got it fig­ured out for com­put­ers and (increas­ingly) smart­phones. To dis­play and nav­i­gate HTML, you need 1) a decent-sized, decent-resolution color screen and 2) a web browser with a solid ren­der­ing engine, plus some min­i­mal things like JavaScript sup­port, book­marks, and a way to select links and enter text. We don’t think about HTML because we feel like we’ve cracked it; we just haven’t got­ten it on every device just yet.

To approach the books vs. blogs prob­lem from the other side:

• What would a read­ing machine designed and opti­mized for blog read­ing look like?
• What would be the key dif­fer­ences between an elec­tronic blog-reader and an elec­tronic book-reader?
• Like­wise, how would the “mar­ket­place” func­tions — pur­chases, sub­scrip­tions, adver­tis­ing — dif­fer on a blog-oriented read­ing machine?
• How suc­cess­fully would such a machine func­tion as a general-purpose elec­tronic reader? That is, how well could a blog-reading machine han­dle tra­di­tional books (and book sales), comics, news­pa­pers, text­books, etc.…
• Since I’ve talked about this recently — could a blog reader have a dif­fer­ent kind of rela­tion­ship to places and spaces — maybe cof­fee shops and inter­net cafés instead of book­stores? — or are we back to the Kindle’s view from nowhere?

It’s worth explor­ing the pos­si­bil­ity! I mean, unless you’re sink­ing cap­i­tal into these things, what do we have to lose?

12 Responses

Robin Sloan says:
October 27, 2009 at 5:15 pm
I love the fact that you specif­i­cally men­tion “mar­ket­place” func­tions. For all their lim­i­ta­tions, one thing I love about both the Kin­dle and the iPhone is the way they make it so easy (too easy!) to pay for things.
The beau­ti­ful thing about RSS is that it’s a sub­scrip­tion — a rela­tion­ship — not a one-off thing. What if you could eas­ily layer a sub­scrip­tion pay­ment on top of that, and make it as fric­tion­less as pay­ment on the iPhone?
Even if it was largely optional, I think it would be rather trans­for­ma­tional. What if, next to Snarkmarket’s header on your blog-reading-machine, there was a lit­tle call­out that said “donate $1 to Snark­mar­ket every month”? That would add up.
Sub­scrip­tions and friction-free pay­ment. My read­ing machines must have these things.
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Matt Thompson says:
October 28, 2009 at 10:03 am
Every now and then, the mask slips, and Robin Sloan, Cre­ativist and Media Trail­blazer, is momen­tar­ily exposed as Robin Sloan, Cor­po­rate Exec­u­tive and Uber-Capitalist. I find myself scan­ning your Kick­starter updates for a casual men­tion of, say, an MBA pro­gram you just completed. :)
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Tim Carmody says:
October 28, 2009 at 10:59 am
Robin’s like Barack Obama that way. Beneath all that grace­ful­ness and feel­ing of hope and change lies his killer instinct. For Obama, it’s pol­i­tics; for Sloan, busi­ness mod­els for new media.
Saheli says:
October 28, 2009 at 11:49 am
But wait, wait, wait, *why* is the Kin­dle so bad for read­ing blogs? I haven’t tried it, since I don’t have one. The rea­sons I think you might want a non-pc machine for read­ing blogs:
1) E-ink. Isn’t this still the true magic sauce of the Kin­dle? It’s sim­ply much eas­ier on the eyes, less energy-consumptive, no fan or heat block on your lap?
2) You queue up a bunch of stuff and then you want to crawl into bed, and you really just want to read,and you don’t want to have to shut down your com­puter there­after, or be sucked into click­ing on links. It’s self-contained.
What does a com­puter give you:
1) multi-purposeness makes it feel less like a one-off indul­gence, espe­cially for peo­ple who don’t live in the media gad­get bubble.
2)You can com­ment really easily
3) You get color and the blog can link to all sorts of other things that you can then also explore on the same multi-purpose machine.
So a blog-tuned read­ing machine would keep the reflec­tive ink and the low energy use­age, be a lit­tle cheaper, get an ergonomic key­board, color and a really good way of book­mark­ing things and sync­ing with your main com­puter so that you can note things and later go explor­ing with the full power of a PC . I think this lat­ter point is key. I don’t see how any of these would hurt a read­ing machine that wanted you to read books. I do think there are ways it might hurt a read­ing machine that wanted you to buy books from only one par­tic­u­lar source.
Robin, cor­rect me if I’m wrong, but I thought the intrin­sic sense of low spend­ing fric­tion is the com­bi­na­tion of a device on which access­ing your prod­uct is really pleas­ant (boils down to the reflec­tive ink and good soft­ware on top of that) and hav­ing a really well stocked store to go shop­ping in. See­ing lots of prod­ucts being sold for rel­a­tively small prices makes it eas­ier for you to con­vince your­self that you’re get­ting a bar­gain and get­ting the per­fect prod­uct for your­self, that you could have been much more of a spend­thrift but you actu­ally restrained yourself.
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John Parker says:
October 28, 2009 at 2:36 pm
You’ve described exactly what I want: A net­book with an e-ink screen. Seri­ously, that’s all I want / need. Light, portable, no touch­screen for me to sticky up with my fin­gers, full-size key­board to cre­ate text, wire­less inter­net and all-day use bat­tery life.
Google Reader + enough local stor­age for offline reading.
Flex­i­bile, open oper­at­ing sys­tem to add browser-aids, mul­ti­me­dia as I see fit. A smart­book, as opposed to as smartphone.
Reading Machines : clusterflock says:
October 27, 2009 at 8:31 pm
[…] Tim reflects, riff­ing off of Jason’s thoughts, on the dif­fer­ences between read­ing books and blogs and asks, “What a ded­i­cated blog reader would look like?” […]
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vanderleun says:
October 27, 2009 at 9:43 pm
What about… just stream­ing here… a hybrid soft­ware bred out of pro­grams that scrape blogs for robo-google-rank blogs (some porn mae­stros have prob­a­bly got this opti­mized) + some mobile sub­set of GoogleReader for a “Con­tents Screen?” (Keeps index and search func­tion of all arti­cles sub­scribed to res­i­dent in the cloud) Head­lines deliv­ered a la Gmail sub­ject lines: Head + short Twit­teresque excerpt. Radio but­tons to stack selec­tions plus read now or read all. Choices to read are fun­neled through a selec­tion of cus­tom CSS styles res­i­dent on your per­sonal machine to opti­mize the screen for your pre­ferred reading/glasses needs. Clips or arti­cles you want to keep are pushed to Gmail or Google Docs or some­thing like Evernote.
Graph­ics get con­verted to very small icon/thumbnails that dis­play when tapped. And to con­verted to black and white for now since color + afford­abil­ity won’t be along for awhile.
In the very late 90s there I saw a pro­to­type called the Go Tablet that had a lot of this func­tion­al­ity — not touch screen, but sty­lus. Anno­ta­tions done by sty­lus too. No web func­tion­al­ity at that time, but it was clearly implicit in the device.
A lot of the above I assume, based on no infor­ma­tion at all, to be some of the func­tion­al­ity that would show up in the Apple Tablet. Why? Because if I wanted to kill the Kin­dle, that’s one of the areas I’d design into it.
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moke says:
October 28, 2009 at 11:26 am
I envis­age a phone that projects texts in light onto sur­faces around us, there will be dif­fer­ent peo­ple vying for the wall space at the same time , just like when you try and read a broad­sheet next to some­one else read­ing a broad­sheet . There will be a tex­tual mash up on the wall and it will look like Babel. Pho­tog­ra­phers will snap these tex­tual inter­fer­ences and post them on there accounts. All these devices will be redun­dant because every­thing will be light based , pro­jected , bro­ken out of the screens , and the beauty of it is we can throw any­thing at it and it wont break.
Im get­ting ready right now with mask­ing tape on the pave­ment for the sun to sun­bleach text onto it so the mes­sage will be clear when i rip the tape off next week.
The devices will get smaller , the text blown up onto walls or beamed directly into the eye. I sus­pect no one will notice it hap­pen­ing as they will be to busy read­ing the manuals.
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Saheli says:
October 28, 2009 at 11:51 am
Moke, I con­stantly fan­ta­size about those pro­jec­tor phones. 
The bleach­ing of one week will make enough con­trast between what was taped and what was not for a mes­sage?? Will you post a link to a pic­ture when you are done?
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vanderleun says:
October 28, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Pro­jec­tor phones? Pro­jec­tor phones!!!? 
No. No. No. And NO! 
Don’t you see? If that hap­pens mankind will never break free from the shack­les of POWERPOINT!
A bookshelf full of different e-readers | Tomorrow Museum says:
October 28, 2009 at 9:59 pm
[…] some­thing like the WikiReader, since it won’t be anti­quated by 2011. Mean­while, here is Tim Car­mody on the pos­si­bil­ity of a ded­i­cated blog reader. I have a french press, a moka pot, and a drip cof­fee maker and I use all three of them reg­u­larly. I […]
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Tim Carmody says:
October 29, 2009 at 6:22 am
1) Blogs are orga­nized by sub­scrip­tions. The basic inter­face would be some­thing like an RSS reader. Fold­ers, feeds, and posts.
2) Blogs are based on links, to both blo­gly and non-blogly sites. Even if most blogs would dis­play just the text from the feeds, the reader would HAVE to be able to dis­play generic web pages. Essen­tially, you need a web browser, at least a bare-bones one. (I.e., you may not need sep­a­rate book­marks, exten­sions, etc.)
3) Blogs are dri­ven by feed­back from their read­ers. You need either a soft­ware or a hard­ware key­board, so read­ers can leave comments.
4) Blogs are sup­ported by adver­tis­ing. It might be obnox­ious to some read­ers, but blogs and peri­od­i­cals will be more will­ing to give their sub­scrip­tions away for free if the reader can pre­serve their ads. Oth­er­wise, you’re stuck with a pay-per-blog fee like the Kin­dle is.
5) You need an online mar­ket­place that also allows you to pur­chase con­tent, for peri­od­i­cals that would pre­fer to sell to sub­scribers rather than go 100% ad-supported. Right now, The New Yorker reserves some web arti­cles for its print sub­scribers; I could imag­ine that you could become a “sub­scriber” of both print and web edi­tions through the store. The reader would also need a keychain/password man­ager to keep up with these sub­scrip­tions and other login information.
6) Twit­ter is a kind of blog­ging. You need a microblog­ging client — prefer­ably one that’s sep­a­rate from the reg­u­lar RSS reader.
7) Why only do blo­gread­ing when so many of us are also blog­writ­ers? You need either a generic blog­ging client sim­i­lar to MarsEdit or the abil­ity to down­load spe­cific ones for Word­press, etc.
8) You need cut-and-paste, and the abil­ity to move quickly back-and-forth between read­ing, nav­i­gat­ing sub­scrip­tions, com­ment­ing, and writing.
9) Some of this func­tion­al­ity could be per­formed by add-on apps or plu­g­ins, rather than being built-in by default. Then, of course, you need an app mar­ket­place, plus the abil­ity to install add-ons at the user level.
10) I con­sider the fol­low­ing open ques­tions, but I’d answer yes to all of them:
* Do you need color?
* Do you need images?
* Do you need video?
* Do you need audio?
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