Reading the news like a book: an e-ink news reader for iPhone

Reading a book on a phone is calm. Reading the news on the same phone rarely is. The words are no harder; the page around them is built to keep you moving. Autoplaying video, a banner that slides up, a list of related stories, then another, and no point at which the page says you are done.

E-ink readers such as a Kindle or a Kobo feel different for a reason that has little to do with the screen. They show one page, in greys, and wait for you. Glosa's News Reader brings that page to the news on iPhone and iPad.

What makes news on a phone tiring

Three things, mostly.

Colour and motion. Bright thumbnails and moving ads pull the eye away from the line you are reading. Each pull is small. Over twenty minutes, it adds up to the feeling of having read a lot and remembered little.

Scrolling. A scroll has no fixed place. You lose your line when the page jumps, and there is no page number to come back to.

No end. A feed that refills itself never tells you that you have caught up, so you stop when you are tired rather than when you are finished.

What an e-ink page changes

An e-ink style page removes those three things on purpose. It is grey on grey paper, with a serif face. Pictures are dithered to greys, so they inform without shouting. Nothing moves until you turn the page. You know where you are: page two of four.

You can get part of this on any iPhone. Grayscale in Accessibility settings takes out colour, and Safari's Reader view takes out the clutter. Neither gives you pages or an end, and both have to be turned on again for every site.

News Reader in Glosa

Glosa is an ebook reader drawn like an e-ink screen. News Reader is a second mode of the app. In Settings, under Glosa opens as, pick News Reader and the home screen becomes your news instead of your bookshelf. Glosa opens in the mode you used last.

The home screen shows today: how many articles are unread and when the feeds were last checked. A row of tabs holds your folders (Tech, Science, World, whatever you named them) with an unread count on each, plus a tab for articles saved for later. Below, the headlines come one page at a time, each with its source, time and first line. Articles you have read turn grey. At the bottom, Mark this page read clears the page, and the pager shows how many pages are left.

If you prefer one story per screen, switch the list to cards. Swipe up for the next card, swipe right or tap to read it.

Reading an article

Tap a headline and the article opens as a page of a book: the site's text without its menus, ads or pop-ups, set in the same type as your novels. You turn pages with a tap on the edge. Turn past the last page and the next article opens; turn back on the first page and you return to the one before. The bar at the bottom names the previous and next stories, so you can decide before you turn.

Because it is the book reader, the book tools work on the news:

• Double-tap a word and a card under the page gives its meaning in that sentence, in your language.
• Highlight a passage in grey, hatch or underline, and add a note.
• Tap Listen and the article is read aloud, the spoken sentence marked, with Apple's voices or natural ones.
• Translate translates the article, useful for news in a language you are learning.

Read later keeps an article in the Saved tab and on your shelf, where it is not cleared away. Keep unread puts it back in the list. Original opens the site itself in Glosa's browser when you need the live page.

Adding your feeds

The + button in News Reader opens Add feeds, with three ways in:

• OPML file. Bring your feeds from Feedly, Inoreader, NetNewsWire or any other reader. Folders are kept, duplicates merged, and audio-only podcasts are left out and listed by name. See what OPML is and how to export it.
• Website. Type a site's name or address. Glosa looks for its feeds, shows roughly how many articles a day each one sends, and lets you pick a folder.
• Suggested. Sites grouped by language and topic, from Ars Technica and The Verge to BBC Tiếng Việt and VnExpress, in each of the app's sixteen languages.

Settings that keep it calm

News Reader checks your feeds while Glosa is open, every hour or every three hours, or only when you pull down to refresh. It never wakes up in the background. Read articles are cleared after 7 or 30 days, or kept for good; saved ones always stay. Your feeds sync between iPhone, iPad and iPhone Duo through iCloud, and there is no account to create.

What it is not

News Reader is for reading, not for monitoring. There are no keyword alerts, no filtering rules and no Mac app; Inoreader and Feedly do those jobs better, and our comparison of RSS readers covers them. It also cannot get past a paywall: when a site sends only a teaser, that is what you read, with a link to the original.

A routine that works

Pick one time of day for the news. Open Glosa, read the first page of headlines, open the two or three stories you care about, and mark the rest read. When the unread count reaches zero, you are done, and the app has nothing more to show you. That last part is the point.