Reading an online article later has never been so easy. Most articles on the web are short, but sometimes you stumble upon a longer essay that’s cumbersome to read in your browser. A click later, though, and the article is saved to your favorite read later service like Instapaper or Pocket. It’s not quite so easy to save your reading material in one place online, though, if what you’re reading isn’t an easy-to-scrape article.
Dotdotdot brings a different approach to online reading. It’s focused on lengthy content, but doesn’t limit itself to articles you find online. It also intends to be the definitive repository for your eBooks and RSS feeds, as well as your online articles. Then it throws in a social networks and tools to save your favorite passages.
Let’s take a look.
The Dashboard
After creating your profile, with your email, Facebook or Twitter, you’re introduced to the social side of Dotdotdot: the Global Timeline. There you’ll find what other users are adding to their reading libraries. Every public article can be added to your own library for a later peek. The app is still in beta, so you won’t see a lot of movement there for now, yet you can still find some gems along the Global Timeline.
Get into the social side of reading at the Dashboard
As you find users with similar tastes, you can refine your personal timeline by following them and keeping track of everything they have been reading. Also on the Dashboard, you can find your stats, including the number of pages you’ve read this week and a quick comparison to your last week’s achievements.
The Library
If the Dashboard is the entrance hall, the Library is most definitely the living room of Dotdotdot. Here you have quick access to all your reading material. Everything is organized by type, title, author, and source, and can be sorted by the date added into the app. Select an item, and a preview pane slides from the right showing the text’s cover, author, title, number of highlights and comments, privacy status and, of course, an option to read the text right way.
Store all your books and long articles in the same place.
But the most notable features of Dotdotdot come next, with its uploader for eBooks in the ePub format (up to 50mb) and access to your Google Reader RSS subscriptions. As you check your unread posts from your feeds, you can just select an article and read on the Dotdotdot environment or add to your library for reading whenever you want. Articles from your RSS are marked as read as you click on them.
Read your RSS feeds in a clean environment.
Then, if you’re out of items to read, you can check the Curated List, which contains the articles features by Dotdotdot. Or, you can add more articles straight from your browser, using its browser extension. This feature captures the article’s title and author, and gives you the option to add to your library or read it now in a clean reading view. It’s like Instapaper or Pocket, only this time integrated in an app that contains all of your reading material.
Use the Browser Extension to capture articles on the go.
Reading on Dotdotdot
Regardless of its features, Dotdotdot wouldn’t be such a promising app without a great reading experience. Compare the way it treats text to other apps of its kind, like Pocket, Instapaper and Readability, and you’ll find that Dotdotdot has the most options among them all when it comes to font size, character and line spacing. It gives you everything you’d want to customize your reading experience.
But you might not care much about that, especially as you find out that you can’t scroll through your articles or eBooks, but instead have to navigate them by turning the pages. That’ll likely really bother you. Scrolling has become an essential part of our online life, and we’re so used to it that we’ll scroll by default to see more text in a browser. Most browser-based reading apps today let you navigate text by scrolling, so Dotdotdot kind of breaks the pattern, right?
Find more options by clicking around, even viewing an archive of the pages as thumbnails.
But let’s understand the reasoning behind this decision. Nowadays, there’s a common habit of scrolling down until something interesting pops up. Most of us don’t read full articles, we just glance through them on the lookout for the essential paragraph.
Remember that Dotdotdot is designed to best fit long-form text and eBooks. Forcing you to turn pages obligates you to focus on a single piece of writing, turning your mind to reading instead of just searching for something interesting in the text.
As soon as you get used to it, page turning has its advantages. First, try using the arrow keys to jump between pages. Eureka, it works. Also if you want to pause your reading, Dotdotdot marks the last page read, so whenever you get back to your text, it’ll be there, waiting for you where you stopped. Finally, you’ll be able to see how many pages you’ve read – from web articles and eBooks alike – in your Dotdotdot stats, something you’d miss if everything was treated as individual, scrollable articles.
Highlights and Memory
Dotdotdot doesn’t stop at helping you read, it also works to help you remember. Selecting text on Dotdotdot automatically highlights it and gives you three options: delete the highlight, comment, and share. What stands out is the comment feature, where you not only can write your own comment to the selected text, but also include tags.
This is a really important aspect of Dotdotdot because the Memory panel is the only search tool available, and it only looks at your highlights, comments and likes. The Memory panel also displays your most recent tags, highlights, comments and likes.
Look after your highlights, tags, comments and likes.
What is frustrating about this is that Dotdotdot doesn’t search your content or its title, author, or source info. As your library grows, unless you add an identification label on every text, the search feature won’t lead you to articles you’re yet to read, or have already read and want to find again. The absence of a powerful search reduces the capability of Dotdotdot to become a storage of all your reading material. We hope to see a full search option added in the future.
Anyone can highlight and comment public articles. That’s not always good.
Then, another interesting fact is that if you upload a public article to Dotdotdot, it can be seen by any user. Anyone who opens that article can then see your highlights, comments, and more, and add their own. This is great in a small sphere, since it can spark discussions and inspire different ways to view the text, but when you take it to a larger amount of users it may transform the article into a babel of highlights, as the introductory article of Dotdotdot clearly shows. This could be solved with a bit of customization, allowing users to visualize only the highlights from who they follow or none at all.
Conclusion
In our search for the perfect online reading app, we usually only find apps that work great for articles, or for eBooks. Dotdotdot offers you the chance to read eBooks, RSS feeds, and longform articles in your browse, and more importantly, to focus on what you read. You can use its tools to build your research, but also to create a diary of your readings.
Dotdotdot brought a twist in a field where the differences lay on small details. It leapfrogs the longform reading app competition, and is not only a great place to read your texts, but also a different way to do it. A different way that’s nice enough, you should definitely give it a try.