My father-in-law, Bob—a Marine and decorated Vietnam veteran—recently surprised us all by bringing a slender box along with him on his latest visit. Inside the box lay a Nook Touch Simple. "This is a good one, right?" he asked. "The ad online said it can hold 1,000 books..." I told him I had heard good things about the Nook in general, but was not familiar with how a 'Simple' operated. "Well, you can't go wrong with the name," Bob replied. "But, help me get that free book off there, the one it came with... Dracula. I don't wanna read that." After I removed...

A few days ago, I mentioned the WordPress plug-in PadPressed, which makes blogs resemble Wordpad documents when read on the iPad. Now our founder and editor emeritus David Rothman has put that plug-in into use on his own blog about his book, The Solomon Scandals, with an emphasis on the availability of sample chapters and other material from the book in that format. Visit it from a desktop web browser and it looks perfectly ordinary. But go there via the iPad’s Mobile Safari, and the interface becomes essentially the same as an iPad app. You can even tap...

The iPad is so popular these days that everything is coming out with special interfaces for it. There was Pulse, which turns a selection of favorite RSS feeds into something similar to a magazine. Then there was Flipboard, which does the same for links posted to social networks. Now here are a couple more web media joining the party. Cooliris, a company known for its browser and iPhone photo apps, has created an app for the iPad called Discover that imports content from Wikipedia and reformats it into an iPad-magazine-style interface. Cooliris hopes eventually to bring the same reformatting technique...

The iPad has been drawing a litany of complaints from people who complain that it’s nothing new, it’s underpowered, and is an all-around imperfect device. Tuan Nguyen at Tom’s Hardware addresses some of these complaints, pointing out that “better” tablets exist and have existed for years, but have entirely failed to take off. Nguyen gives five reasons tablets have failed to sell, at the same time explaining why the iPad is by and large an exception to these reasons: Tablets are niche devices. Full OSes were always there, yet those who complained that the iPad doesn’t have one still never bought one. High-end...

Marco Arment, developer of the Instapaper offline webpage reading iPhone app, has posted a blog entry about his decision to implement page-turning in addition to scrolling in the latest version of Instapaper. He uses two Macintosh calculator programs—the traditional one (left) and a different one called Soulver—as an example to explain why it is a bad idea to try to make computer interfaces resemble the physical item they are impersonating. The traditional app is essentially a virtual pocket calculator, complete with rows and rows of clickable little buttons—which are entirely redundant given that you have a full physical keyboard in front...