5 Good Apps for Content Consumption Junkies Like Myself

As I patiently but anxiously wait for my Kindle Touch 3G to arrive in the mail, I realize I have surrounded myself with a couple of nifty tools to make my content consumption addiction easier, faster, and more efficient. Although I consider my self the Jamaican Muslim version of Henry Bemis from the Twilight Zone, I still need a little bit more than just a “brick and mortar” Library to satiate my diverse content consumption needs.

You are probably already familiar with many of these apps, but I have found them extremely helpful in covering 3 simple areas:

1. How do get access to tons of content?
2. How do I organize all this great content?
3. What type of tools will help me organize all this audio and textual content?

Instapaper. This app has been around for a while but I only recently started using it about 3 weeks ago. Instapaper is a simple app that allows you to save web article pages from any web browser, Smartphone, Tablet, E-reader and just about any other device. Any article that you “Read Later” with Instapaper (irrespective of what device you used to save the article) goes into the “cloud” and you can then access that web content from anywhere that is connected to the internet. All your devices that are connected to the internet do a short sync via Instapaper and now you have all that content stored on your device locally. Once the content is on the device, no internet connection is needed. It’s all on the device. You can read content on any one of the devices that have downloaded the web content from Instapaper’s cloud. With my third content device (Kindle Touch) on the way, I can now sync content from my IPhone, Mac Book, and Kindle Touch. (or any other computer that is connected to the Internet). It really makes it easy to consume a lot more long form article content online, or maybe I should say offline.

Goodreads. Yet another “cloud” content based app, Goodreads has several Android and IPhone apps that compliment the goodreads.com website. Goodreads is basically Amazon’s book recommendation engine, wishlist, and book reading history turned into a full blown website. They are not affiliated with Amazon, but it’s probably where Amazon should have taken their recommendation/wishlist app. The site allows readers around the world to share books they’ve read, books they want to read, books they are currently reading while allowing users to rate, review and comment on any book. The site (and the complimentary phone apps) have a wonderful recommendation engine that is separated by a variety of categories (they call these categories Genres). You can then customize this Genre list and Goodreads will select books that match these Genres. The more you submit to Goodreads the better it gets at giving you books that match your interests. The site is extremely social. You can read books from your friends and share your book lists. Once again all this activity is synced between all your devices that are using the Goodreads app and website.

Calibre. Actually found this app searching for an article Bookmark app that would sync with a Kindle device. Calibre is basically the ITunes version of e-book management tool. It allows you to update the covers of e-books, titles, topics, categories, publisher date and tons of other meta data. It also syncs and converts all your e-book files to the appropriate format for your e-reader device. For those who want to fine tune their e-book library I really don’t know another piece of software that is more easy to use and efficient than Calibre. It covers just about all e-book devices and it’s…wait for it…FREE.

Flipboard. Yet another recent addition to my content consumption tool kit, Flipboard has really transformed how I consume content. It was initially built for the IPad, but now it’s available for the IPhone (sorry folks, no Android yet but I’m sure it’s coming). It’s a social magazine app that allows you to easily flip (literally) through tons of content from hundreds, if not thousands of publishers. You can also pull content from your Twitter and Facebook feed. This app is all about making content beautiful while making it easier to share that same content on your favorite social networks. Like an infographic that visually beautifies raw data to make it easier to consume, Flipboard is no different.

Audible. I think audible.com has been around long enough for most people to be familiar with the website and the complimentary app for Android and the IPhone. Getting into audio books via audible has allowed me to consume so much more content. The best thing about audio books, is unlike regular books you can listen to these books while being somewhat idle with other things. Whether you are washing dishes, cutting the lawn, going for a walk or run, or just listening to an audio book at work. (of course while doing work). Other than the standard audio player options, you have the ability to bookmark (somewhat of an electronic dog ear) any part of the audio so you can refer back to it later. What is truly missing from Audible is the ability to sync your e-bookmarks with an audible app or maybe an Audible plugin for ITunes. All your audible purchases are still in the “cloud” which makes for an easy way to download your audible files to your phone or computer.

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