London Review of Books

I live abroad now and reading the LRB on my iPad is excellent. The paper issues don’t always catch up with me, but the app means that I can always have the recent issues with me. The interface is simple and not too confusing, and they’ve resisted the temptation to use keywords and metadata to give you a deep dive into the archives at the end of each a article. Instead you have just the next article. The only thing that’s missing is a way of checking out the historical archives, but to be honest I would only use it to read the personal sections.

The poems are usually opaque, very occasionally interesting. Book reviews can be very long and interesting, full enough to save you the trouble of reading some important nonfiction books. The LRB sometimes has lengthy and really interesting articles on major questions of the day. A memorable case was the entire issue given over to what really happened on the day of the Grenfell Tower fire and on the days afterwards. Too often we get long articles about obscure people, and letters putting right extremely minor questions about who did or didn’t say something or wasn’t or was somewhere. In thirty years’ time the LRB will have an article about a minor artist who did or did not spend time with one of Banksy’s relatives. But when it’s good, it’s very good.

this is the best app for reading long text in: extremely clean layout and typography; small margins left and right and none top and bottom; simple to navigate; doesn't distract from the text, which is put at the center of the experience, given as much space as possible, and made delightfully easy to focus on; supports offline reading effortlessly. obviously, the above is a remark just about the app - not the content made available through the app (the London Review of Books proper).

I love the LRB, but the app is only okay. It’s not buggy, and does the job, but it could do so much more. For example, you could access the whole archive digitally, you could “follow” a contributor your like and be notified about new posts from them, you could comment, discuss and share content, you could search for articles based on topic tags (brexit/nhs/motherhood), you could curate your own content (e.g no poems). The only “feature” that it offers is a scrapbook, which I think is great, but that alone won’t entice digital natives to the publication. Given the quality of the content, that should be a top priority from both a business and social standpoint.

It’s great to be able to read LRB on the go and the app is clear and legible - but PLEASE could you fix it so that when you return it takes you back to where you were the last time. If you’re reading on a tube journey into work (say) you can waste almost the entire time trying to find out where you were in a long article (which are often what I go to LRB for). Other publication apps seem to be able to manage this.