10 Apps & Sites That Bring Back the Joy of Reading

3. Longform for iPad

The newest app on my list, Longform just came out this week. It’s the creation of Aaron Lammer and Max Linsky, the same team behind the excellent curation service Longform.org. We published a long Q&A with Lammer yesterday so I’ll keep this summary brief: Longform’s iPad app collects recent long-form articles (2,000 words or more) from 25 hand-picked publications, including Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Esquire, Mother Jones, National Geographic, The New York Review of Books, and of course Longform.org itself, which highlights three or four new long-form articles every day.

Lammer told me that he and Linsky originally started Longform.org as a way to help people find material to fill up their Instapaper queues, but eventually decided that Instapaper was a little too complicated, and that some readers might appreciate direct access to long articles from the websites’ top publications. Their app shows articles either in their original Web settings or in a de-cluttered reading view. It can show articles from your Readability reading list (see next item). It also lets you share articles via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr, or save them to your Readability, Instapaper, or Read It Later accounts.

Next app: Readability.

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Author: Wade Roush

Between 2007 and 2014, I was a staff editor for Xconomy in Boston and San Francisco. Since 2008 I've been writing a weekly opinion/review column called VOX: The Voice of Xperience. (From 2008 to 2013 the column was known as World Wide Wade.) I've been writing about science and technology professionally since 1994. Before joining Xconomy in 2007, I was a staff member at MIT’s Technology Review from 2001 to 2006, serving as senior editor, San Francisco bureau chief, and executive editor of TechnologyReview.com. Before that, I was the Boston bureau reporter for Science, managing editor of supercomputing publications at NASA Ames Research Center, and Web editor at e-book pioneer NuvoMedia. I have a B.A. in the history of science from Harvard College and a PhD in the history and social study of science and technology from MIT. I've published articles in Science, Technology Review, IEEE Spectrum, Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Technology and Culture, Alaska Airlines Magazine, and World Business, and I've been a guest of NPR, CNN, CNBC, NECN, WGBH and the PBS NewsHour. I'm a frequent conference participant and enjoy opportunities to moderate panel discussions and on-stage chats. My personal site: waderoush.com My social media coordinates: Twitter: @wroush Facebook: facebook.com/wade.roush LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/waderoush Google+ : google.com/+WadeRoush YouTube: youtube.com/wroush1967 Flickr: flickr.com/photos/wroush/ Pinterest: pinterest.com/waderoush/