Holmes:  I suppose that you could not possibly whistle, yourself, in your sleep? Miss Stoner:  Certainly not.  But why? … Watson:  My God, I whispered; did you see it? Holmes: That is the baboon. Tap to start; swipe to turn pages; tap to start/stop audio; double tab to sync your reading position with audio; adjust your audio layer volumes; tap to adjust your reading speed…  Ingenious, Watson. Finally, a Holmes rendition worthy of Holmes.  “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” on the iPad by Booktrack: “Booktrack represents a new chapter in the evolution of...

Near the top of my essential apps list (and I’m using this in the broadest sense of applications that run on PC and Mac OS X platforms, the iPad and iPhone) is Instapaper. What is Instapaper?  It is a free app/service for web browsers ($4.99 for iPad/iPhone) that allows you to send the text of whatever web page, blog post, e-newspaper article, e-whatever to a server, where it is stored until you want to read it later.  The ads are stripped out, though it preserves article graphics, and it is reformatted beautifully. To use Instapaper create an account at instapaper.com, install the Read it later...