I am very proud to announce to launch of Spreed:News today. Spreed:News is a mobile application that gives users a better reading experience on their mobile devices. The first version of our software will be available only through the iPhone. However, we will be working hard over the next month to offer both Windows Mobile and Blackberry solutions.

Using Spreed:News users can customize their news\blog feeds and read articles through the Spreed proprietary reader. Our proprietary reader organizes words in logical groupings that are easy for the brain to digest. By flashing these groupings, we are able to increase users reading speed and because there is no interaction necessary after the user chooses the article it is simple and easy to read the news on the go.

We are very excited to be releasing the the first of many products that Spreed has to offer. Please contact me (Dave Coleman) at dave@spreedinc.com , if you have any questions, comments or feedback.

For a copy of the press release documenting our launch click here and watch the demo of Spreed:News found below

Those of you who are tech-savvy probably already saw the mistake we made in yesterday’s blog. In our excitement over what we had perceived to be a major step forward in mobile device design, we rushed to an incorrect assumption. A statement on Readius’s website was misunderstood and led us to think that this was something more than e-ink. But the article in the NY Times clearly stated otherwise. Oh well. At least we were right about the size.

One of our blog readers did point out that;

“…The new gen Sony Reader about to launch will read the ePUB format (a new standard in ebook formats put together by the IDPF), and ePUB is essentially XML. The Sony Reader with its E-ink display will therefore be able to have internal links (index entries, table of contents, references, etc.), re-sizeable and re-flowable text, etc. I.e. all the trappings of XML.”

This is a positive step, but until e-ink is able to display in colour and handle multimedia, there wil be significant usability limitations.

At Spreed we love the Kindle. Any technological innovation that makes electronic reading easier and more accessible is alright with us. But the product has two clear limitations that bother us. First, and foremost, is its size. We get it – Amazon is almost metaphorically replicating the traditional book here. But in this case we think holding on to a form factor that is quickly becoming anachronistic is a mistake. People no longer want “portable”, they want “pocket-size” when it comes to their mobile devices. Why should their mobile reading device be any different?

The second limitation is Amazon’s decision to use e-ink. Again, they’re trying to replicate the traditional reading experience. Less light being emitted from the page means fewer saccades (eye movements) which means a slightly more pleasant experience. But at what cost? E-ink is necessarily a picture of the page. It is not HTML or any dynamic code, and that renders the device little more than a picture window. Obviously, Spreed is all about leveraging the power of the computer to assist and improve the reading experience, so our bias here is pretty transparent. But by opting for e-ink, rather than a traditional browser, the Kindle forces itself into a corner and prevents the user from using the device in so many other ways.

Thankfully, there are others out there who are moving in the right direction. Case in point: Polymer Vision’s new Readius. Check out this article from the New York Times that describes the Readius in more detail.

The Readius is trying to offer pretty much everything that the Kindle does. Only it meets the two criteria above – it’s pocket-sized (therefore truly mobile) and is not limited by e-ink. Take a look at the picture and it’s not hard to imagine the device as a phone. Isn’t that exactly what we really want?

Congratulations to Polymer Vision for taking us one more step in the right direction.

For a few years now there have been various journal papers and blog articles positing the theory that our reading behaviour, that of the so-called Google Generation, is changing to adapt to the medium of the internet, some say becoming more shallow. McLuhan followers will have been sitting smugly in front of their screens. The medium is the message, right? Well, more recently studies on student reading behaviour and ebooks at University College London and the University of Toronto have given me (more) food for thought.

The work being done by these two great institutions is certainly starting to challenge our assumptions on how we read online. Professor Dave Nicholas’ work at CIBER, UCL (see the JISC national ebooks observatory project and survey here) found that:

‘[…] the length of time of an average e-book session is surprising, but it chimes very well with previous CIBER deep log studies: 34.6 per cent of university teachers say they spend less than ten minutes online, for students the figure is 23.2 per cent. Findings from the UCL SuperBook study suggest that around half the time that users spend on e-book platforms is actually devoted to navigating the information space and finding content, so these figures are even more surprising, even if the hypothesis that users are printing for subsequent reading holds true. Even more remarkably, university teachers are even more likely to dip in and out of e-book content, rather than even reading a single whole chapter. So much for that pejorative phrase, the ‘Google Generation’!’ [my emphasis]

And a similar study by Peter Jones at the University of Toronto (not yet published) found that:

‘A user may typically do a quick scan of an eBook for their immediate needs, and quit.’

One of their respondents, considered to be a ‘lead user’ of online scholarly platforms admitted

‘When it comes to web resources, if it doesn’t give me what I want in 5-10 minutes, I’m gone.’

So exactly what is going on here? Is the volume of information made available to us forcing us to skim and scan, and as a result are we losing the ability to ‘deep read’? And therefore the ability to fully digest and comprehend what we’re reading?

Like the rest of my peers, the volume of information I now have to work through on a daily basis seems to have grown exponentially. There are newspapers, emails, trade journals, conference proceedings, academic studies, meeting minutes, agendas, internal reports, supplier proposals, newsletters, licenses, contracts, industry blogs, white papers, and maybe, just maybe, some time to open my Sony Reader and enjoy some fiction at the end of the day (although thanks to some enterprising plugins I’m now able to convert much of my office reading into the Sony BBeB format too).

But hold on, when I recently read Wuthering Heights on my Sony Reader (for the first time, I’m ashamed to admit!), I poured over every word. Slowly, deliberately. Aren’t we all still doing this too? When I find a blog I connect with, I’ll spend far more time deep reading than with one less pertinent to my life. Even in preparing to write this piece I have spent considerable effort reading and re-reading the papers I’ve quoted.

The fact is, when I need to, I can deep read just as well as 20 years ago before the web was ubiquitous. I certainly haven’t lost that skill. And my children (aged 6 and 3) will also learn how to deep read, as opposed to scan. When I read Harry Potter to them every night at bedtime I certainly don’t skim through the less exciting parts. When we read their school books together we languish over every word, absorbing its meaning and context within the overall story. They wouldn’t want to skim even if they knew how!

Perhaps the way in which we are reportedly forced to read online and offline now is actually more about the search for the relevant. Our more developed skills in skim reading and scanning are formed by ‘the intersection of thee moving targets’ according to the UofT study:

• Awareness – what resources I know to be out there (which blogs, which newspapers, which wikis etc.).

• Collection – the range and completeness of the content in those resources.

• Findability – how easy it is to navigate within those resources.

So, getting back to the findings of these studies, i.e. that we typically spend less than 10 minutes in any given reading session… it strikes me that students are merely searching and navigating the content universe in short bursts, as we all do, trying to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. They gather together the relevant and pertinent content and, in many cases will print off the bits they need in order to take them back to their digs to digest and analyze at a much more thorough pace later.

The CIBER study describes this as ‘horizontal information seeking’:

A form of skimming activity, where people view just one or two pages from an academic site and then `bounce’ out, perhaps never to return. The figures are instructive: around 60 per cent of e-journal users view no more than three pages and a majority (up to 65 per cent) never return.

And from the same study, ‘squirreling behaviour’:

Academic users have strong consumer instincts and research shows that they will squirrel away content in the form of downloads, especially when there are free offers. [Don’t we all? Who can resist a freebie?]

I don’t believe there is such a thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ reading behaviour. I don’t believe the Google Generation is synonymous with dumbed-down reading as we disaggregate and re-aggregate books into ever smaller ‘chunks’ or ‘sound bites’ presented online. We’re just trying to find ever more efficient ways of navigating the volume of information presented to us on a daily (even hourly!) basis.

Perhaps we’re not changing our reading behaviour at all. Perhaps we’re merely developing new strategies in searching for what we need in an ever expanding and propagating universe of content. Perhaps what we’re really seeing is more widespread use of ‘horizontal information seeking’ which is entirely appropriate in our situation.

So…are we really changing the way we read?

Search me.

Mark Majurey
Digital Development Director at Taylor and Francis Group, the international academic publisher of journals and books.

It has been a while since the last time we posted on our blog, but don’t let that fool you. The wheels are turning here at the Spreed Headquarters as we get very close to the launch of our first commercial product, Spreed News. I won’t go into too much detail about the product right now as we want to leave a bit of a surprise for our launch. However, what I can tell you all is that Spreed mobile will be a better way of reading your news on the go. Reading your news on a mobile device can be a tricky task at times. Current solutions often overwhelm the reader with too much text and involve constant interaction that makes it hard to get through your news quickly while you are out and about. Spreed mobile has tackled this problem with our innovative news reader which deals the last mile of content consumption; the actual reading of the text. We are very excited to be developing this application for the iPhone and will be releasing the product into the wild in the next couple of weeks. Until then stay tuned!