Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, which (full disclosure!) is the publication you are reading now, recently penned an intriguing takedown of the idea that apps are the future of publishing. He's way too classy to point out that it's a direct and concrete rebuttal of WIRED editor in chief Chris Anderson's "The Web is Dead" feature of 2010, but I guess that's why he keeps thugs like me on the payroll.

So! Apps will take over, claims the editor in chief of one esteemed technology publication, only they didn't, says the head of another. I call it a draw, and here's why.

Apps did take over. But not in a way that's going to make any publisher on Earth happy.

I love reading news in apps, and on a tablet or phone, I definitely spend more time reading news in apps than in the browser. So do millions of other people. Of course, we're not using the bloated, walled-garden style apps that publishers want us to, even if they're free with our print subscriptions.

We're reading in Instapaper. And News.me. And Zite, and Flipboard, and Pocket (formerly Read it Later). If I didn't have to cruise the web for work, I don't know if I'd read anything in a browser anymore. And in the case of both Instapaper and News.me, advertisements are stripped from the content I'm consuming. Is that a suicidal thing for a journalist whose income is ultimately dependent on ad revenue? Probably, but I can't help myself. The reading experience is just so good.

In this era, social -- Twitter and Facebook -- are how we find things to read. And then we time-shift our consumption of this material. It's TiVo for the web, which previously demanded that we interrupt our workday or carry around a browser full of open tabs in order to read the things we're interested in.

Gawker alum and The Awl founder Choire Sicha has argued that these webpage-scraping reading apps are straight-up theft. I don't know if that's true, but one thing's for sure, the more popular they become, the less time we're all going to spend on webpages, "engaging" with advertisements.

Ultimately, it makes me wonder whether paywalls really are the future of good content. We became accustomed to paying for content with nothing but our attention, and now we're not even willing to offer that -- at least not in a way that is monetizable. (I surely hope it doesn't come to in-text product placements.) 

Alternately, if publishers think that aggregator apps are a bridge too far -- the app equivalent of a Huffington Post that doesn't even bother to re-write the stories from which it draws -- I wonder if it will mean the end of apps like Instapaper.

All I know is that what's going on with apps and publishing right now doesn't appear to fit anyone's narrative.

The KYOBO eReader, Hanvon C18, Bambook Sunflower and Koobe Jin Yong Reader all use full-color Mirasol displays

For those of us who still think tablets are a less enjoyable reading experience than plain old glossy magazine paper, the good news is that the elves at Qualcomm have been busy turning their Mirasol color e-ink display into something more than perennial vaporware. Displays like this one are different from the backlit LCD panels on tablets in that they are reflective and require an external light source to be viewable. Ultimately, it's this sort of display that will give us true replacements for printed material.

The Mirasol display, which uses tiny mirrors to refract light in a way that is reminiscent of irridescent butterfly wings, has apparently been especially hard to manufacture, because it's taken more than four years to ramp production volume to the point that this display could be sold to consumers. The result are devices (still only available in Asia) with 5.3 inch, 800-480 pixel screens. That means a display density of 223 pixels-per-inch, which is twice the resolution of an iPad but falls short of the resolution in Apple's Retina display. Mirasol has a high enough refresh rate to allow web navigation and video playback, albeit with some flicker.

Mirasol's primary competition is E-ink's Triton display, which uses the same technology found in the black and white displays that Kindle made famous, but overlays them with a color filter.

The folks at Good E Reader did a side-by-side comparison of the two technologies, and its seems clear that Mirasol is the superior (but also more expensive) option.

Mirasol remains washed-out in comparison to the best that ink-on-paper has to offer, and there's something to be said for the stained-glass effect that's achieved when displaying video and photographs on a backlit surface. That said, if you're wondering what magazines and books will be delivered on when e-readers have achieved mass-market penetration and paper is relegated to luxury publications like Monocle, it's likely it will be something like this.

"Get a Computer" by Toothpaste for Dinner

A friend sends me a link to a 60 Minutes segment she feels it's important I watch. I'm on an iPad—not that it matters, because it's just as much a PC as  the overgrown microcomputers that go by that name—and clicking on the link lands me here:

Why, God? Why?

And that is it. That is literally the end of my interaction with this site, because my only option is to download the iPad app. There is no alternative—no way to click through to the video or text that I was after. And you know what? I'm not going to download your stupid app. Because I am not at home on my own wifi, and that would be an anti-social use of public bandwidth, not to mention the fact that this connection isn't so great, so it would probably take, for all I know, half an hour.

More importantly: Why do so many Web developers think that tablets are an excuse to break the functionality of the Web? Anyone who does this, even if it's just an interstitial ad for a tablet app, should be forced to put the following disclaimer at the top of their tablet-detecting sites:

ATTENTION USER: We know you were enjoying the frictionless access to content that is the implicit promise of a hyperlink, but we would rather you bounce off the outer berm of our walled garden, because ad rates are higher on our tablet apps or something? All we know is, somebody on the 13th floor needs to show steady growth in "engagement" on "post-PC" devices.

It feels like vandalism. This is what hackers do. So why are companies defacing their own sites? Is it really so hard to understand that the browser on a tablet device is in all important respects the equal of the browser on a laptop, and, depending on the machine, in many cases superior?

I know it's petty to rant about this sort of thing when the larger story—the death of the open Web—is the greater threat to the free exchange of information. But this particular manifestation of it—cravenly commercial and stubbornly immune to the most basic tenets of usability—is in some respects one of its most visible expressions.