It’s been just over a year since this iPad only newspaper launched, and today it finally came to the iPhone. With it comes the only content written for a digital-only daily newspaper that covers topics ranging from News, Business, Gossip, Opinion, Arts & Life, Apps & Games, and Sports.

While this is great news for The Daily, I cannot help but feel it is a tad anticlimactic. In the year since it launched we’ve seen any number of free and equally useful aggregator apps. one in particular, Pulse, does an excellent job of organizing diverse sources into a coherent whole. I’ve used Pulse and I like it a lot. It offers the possibility of much the same breadth of topics while not costing the user anything.!–more–>

And it’s not alone, which makes the success of The Daily rather puzzling. You would think it would fail in the face of so much free competition, and yet it now has an iPad app.

The Daily is free to download with a monthly subscription starting at $2. You can even share a subscription between your iPad and iPhone.

iTunes

It’s been a few months since we last heard from Paper.li, and today it just added another useful tool.

Paper.li is a website that specializes in personalized digital newspapers, and ithelps you build that newspaper by gathering excerpts from articles all over the web. Its new “Publish it” bookmarklet is going to make gathering the content that much easier.

And it’s simple to use, too. Simply add the bookmarklet to your bookmark folder or the bookmark row in your browser. When you’re reading a page that you’d like to include in a paper, simply click on the bookmarklet to add an excerpt of the content.

But that is only the first of Paper.li’s features. Later on, you can go to your account on Paper.li and edit this article or its parent website as one of the multiple news sources for your newspaper, as well as add filters for keywords, hashtags, and usernames.  You can then choose where to place it in your newspaper (or you can even delete it). If you’re not interested in making your own digital newspaper, you can search for and read newspapers made by other members.

eLinea, a Dutch digital content distributor, has recently added more publishers to its catalog.

Yesterday it announced that it had signed 5 Belgian magazines and newspapers including Ons Erfdeel, nY, Kluger Hans, RifRaf and Filmmagie. This will bring its catalog to include dozens of magazines, blogs, newspapers, podcasts, and radio stations.

eLinea is a service to watch because it doesn’t offer the usual periodical subscription service. it’s an experiment in digital reading where customers have the privilege of buying individual articles from the various participating magazines. Readers can also subscribe to specific writers or topics. The articles can be read online or downloaded as PDF or Epub. Readers have the option of transferring their articles to almost any eBook Reader (besides the Kindle). They can also use any number of reading apps on smartphones, tablets, or the iPad.

It’s probably too early to call eLinia a success or a failure, but it is a concept that is worth watching.

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As you probably know, Amazon gives away 1 free Android app everyday in its Android Appstore. Today’s app is the New York Post app.

if you’re not familiar with this newspaper, then you probably don’t know that it’s a tabloid.  The quality of the content and accuracy of the reporting reflect that label.  This app offers all the same content you’d find on the website, as well as the ads.

That detail has made a number of buyers unhappy, and the app currently has  well over 100 1-star reviews.

The app is exclusively available for the Amazon Appstore, and the normal retail is $2. Today would be a good chance to save a couple of bucks.

Amazon

It’s been just over 2 months since its last update and today paper.li rolled out a new set of features.

The DIY digital newspaper provider added 3 major refinements. You can now use one or more RSS feeds as a source for your content, and you can filter that feed for specific keywords. You can also set the priority of the feed so its content is more/less likely to end up as the lead article in a particular day’s newspaper.

What’s even better is that paper.li also now lets the publisher of a digital newspaper filter out the more prolific content sources. For example, let’s say that you used an excerpt from Gizmodo, a blog that posts 50 or more articles a day. You don’t want all the posts, so you block them from appearing.

One more tool was added today. Along with letting you use new sources and controlling how much you use, paper.li also added an improved search function so you find content better.

via paper.li

Can authors make money for signing books? Possibly with a new eBook signing technology called InScribed Media from a company called Ironcutter Media. The platform will enable book retailers and publishers to add a digital signature at the point of check out.

Authors can sign the eBook using a small pen tablet, like a Wacom Bamboo pen tablet. They can either presign a digital file, which can be added to an eBook automatically at checkout, or the buyer can send a request to the book store or publisher for a personalized message, which the author can in turn respond to via email. The technology allows for publishers and bookstores to offer this autograph as a free service or they can charge for the digital John Hancock.

To me, the idea of buying a digital autograph seems a little impersonal and kind of defeats the warmness that going to a reading and getting a book signed adds to the reading experience. But then again, maybe it’s a good way for authors to make a little extra money.

What do you think?

Paper.li, a website that specializes in personalized digital newspapers, announced a whole slew of updates yesterday.

You can now add multiple news sources for single newspaper, as well as filter those sources for keywords, hashtags, and usernames.  After you’ve picked the articles, you now have more options to organize where it is placed in your newspaper (or you can even delete it).

If you’re not interested in making your own digital newspaper, you can search for ones made by other members. new search options include an improved key word search and the ability to search by title, publisher, or source.

There are quite a few other updates which all add up to a significant change in the feature set.

via paper.li

It’s only been a few weeks since the launch of its new paywall, and The New York Times already has 100,000 people signed up to pay between $15 and $35 to read the newspaper.

But even this great news is still weighed down by the fact that operating profits are down from this time last year. In fact, everything but digital ad revenues declined anywhere between 3.4% and 7.5% from last year.

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Amazon just announced that all Kindle owners who subscribe to the New York Times on the Kindle will now be able to read that same news on The New York Times website at no additional charge.

According to Yasmin Namini, SVP, marketing and circulation, The New York Times Media Group: “The Times’ digital subscription plan was designed to offer access to our high-quality journalism across a variety of platforms. New York Times readers on Kindle are a very loyal and important audience, and we are pleased be able to include online access as part of their subscription experience.”

This will eliminate a lot of the price inequity between the Kindle, iPad, and smartphone subscriptions. When The New York Times announced its paywall last week, the iPad subscription (which costs about the same as the Kindle subscription) came with website access included. It wasn’t until today that the Kindle subscription got that access.

Google launched a new digital magazine yesterday called Think Quarterly. Yes, the company dedicated  to getting you information you need as fast as possible has decided to take a step back and contemplate the longer view.

Unfortunately, the site appears to  have crashed under the load, so when I send you there the link might not work.

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