The world is awash in great writing and journalism, from books to articles on the internet. That leaves a ton of stuff to sort through. So having it all in one place makes it easier to find the best content, and saves lots of time.
Scribd offers access to a vast library of content straight from any device, via the app or a web browser.
Some people say it’s hard to make time for reading. But others find the challenge in being able to afford all the books they’d like to consume. In both cases this subscription service can help, bringing unlimited written content to all your devices.
Reading is a skill, and like all skills, there’s always room for improvement. So if you constantly find yourself re-reading paragraphs, or just staring at a book but never finishing it, these courses can help you out.
One of the key secrets of super successful people is that they read. A lot. After all, Elon Musk didn’t learn how to build cars or rockets by watching YouTube videos; he’s got a daily diet of books.
Microsoft has teamed up with Barnes & Noble with a $300 million investment that will create a new subsidiary focused on accelerating “the transition to e-reading.” Microsoft will take a 17.6% equity stake in a subsidiary, which is yet to be named, while Barnes & Noble will own the remaining 82.4%.
The move will provide Microsoft with its own answer to iBooks, with plans for a NOOK application that will run on Windows 8, and it’ll give users an alternative to the Kindle Store.
If you have ever used iBooks or the Kindle app on your iPhone or iPad, you probably have experienced virtual page turning… and probably turned it off shortly thereafter.
Why? Well, virtual page turning is just a fancy animation that does nothing practical. It slows the reading experience down (however minutely) just to give you a little millisecond voyage through an e-reading uncanny valley.
After all, in the real world, pages do more than just flip: you can rifle through them, bend them back, check multiple spots in a book at once, bookmark places with your fingers, etc. Wouldn’t it be cool if your iPad’s virtual page-turning animations could do the same things?
About twelve hours after iOS 5 was officially released, I went through the considerable bother of downgrading my iPad 2 back down to iOS 4.3. iOS 5 was a great update, but for me, it had one fatal problem: it broke my beloved Stanza e-reading app irrevocably, and going without Stanza on my iPad was as impossible to contemplate as living without Mail or Safari.
For Stanza lovers, the situation is extremely frustrating, because Stanza breaks so totally under iOS 5 that you can’t even load an ebook without the app crashing. However, the original developers can’t update the app, because they sold it to Amazon.
When Amazon originally bought Stanza back in 2009, they promised they weren’t buying Stanza just to kill some of the free competition to their own Kindle e-reader. And, in fact, Amazon has updated the product several times since 2009, notably to bring excellent iPad support to the app.
But with iOS 5, Amazon appears to have abandoned all support for Stanza. That’s particularly frustrating, because not only was Stanza the best non-commercial e-reader around, it had many features the competition still doesn’t have: for example, its excellent typesetting and formatting options, its wide range of supported formats and its killer swipe-to-dim feature, which makes reading ebooks easier on the eyes.
