Imagine this: it’s 5am in the morning, your wife is sleeping. But you’re awake, and you don’t want to leave the internet as you’ve got some cool conversations going on with your Twitter followers that just can’t be interrupted now, even if your wife is sleeping and you feel a little bit guilty about it. You stayed up until 5am again. Every day, every night, with the usual excuse that you have to work on your website, you decide to avoid the bed and focus on the latest stories from John Gruber instead. You know everything about iPhone multitasking. You got pissed off when that Adobe’s employee published that post against Apple, you installed iPhone OS 4.0 Beta 1 and you watched Twitter’s Chirp live streaming while having a good cup of coffee. You’re an internet guru, but that doesn’t mean you have excuses for staying up all night again, alone in the dark with your glasses shining in the light of your Macbook.

Then one day, completely enlightened, you thought that maybe, just maybe, you should find a productivity purpose for your dirty little AM secret and do something good for yourself instead of faving tweets. Perhaps you should work? No, something more intellectual. Something that requires darkness, a comfortable chair and silence: you realized you can read in those morning hours. A calm, relaxing and stress-free read you’re usually not able to have during the day because everything is too fast, too short. Read can’t happen when writing blog posts. Definitely not.

Maybe it’s time to give Instapaper another spin.

Read more

Laura Miller has as insightful post about the importance of metadata for books, and what Apple’s iBooks Store really lacks:

“Let’s say I recently read and enjoyed Val McDermid’s “A Place of Execution,” and I want to find more crime fiction like it. On iBooks, I can discover McDermid’s other novels easily enough, but that’s pretty much it. The only other metadata about “A Place of Execution” that the Apple store gives me to work with is that this title belongs to the “Mysteries & Thrillers” category. So does Lisa Lutz’s “The Spellmans Strike Back,” a comic mystery that’s part of a series about the misadventures of a family of wacky detectives in San Francisco. Sure, they’re both crime fiction, but Lutz’s book couldn’t be more different in flavor from McDermid’s gloomy, flinty procedurals set in Northern England and Scotland.

Eventually, iBooks might collect some reader reviews for McDermid’s book; the store is too new to have many reviews at the moment, but the software does provide for it. I might learn from those reviews that McDermid writes in a mystery subgenre sometimes called “tartan noir.” If I’m lucky, the review mentioning this fact might also list some of the other authors who work in the same vein. Then I could search iBooks for their names, seeking more bleak detective fiction to feed my newly acquired appetite. But that’s a long chain of maybes.”

And I couldn’t agree more. The iBooks Store’s (but I’d put the App Store itself on board, too) navigation and organization are flawed. Apple, fix it.