I’ve never been a particularly disciplined reader. Outside of the constraints of an academic reading list I’ve always found it difficult to stay the course on one book at a time, and if my interest level dips I tend to stop reading rather than pushing through. Even with books I have been very much enjoying, I can easily run out of steam and find them sitting on the windowsill untouched for a few weeks before I admit to myself I’m not going to pick them up again any time soon and re-shelve them. Hence I have never seen the end of Moby Dick, Stephen King’s The Stand or Wuthering Heights. At any given time I might have five or more books on the go, and be making unsatisfactory progress with all of them; hence, at the moment, I have bookmarks in:

- Beckett, Samuel; Molloy (re-reading)
- Foer, Jonathan Safran; Eating Animals
- Klein, Naomi; No Logo (re-reading having not finished c. 2001)
- Nabokov, Vladimir; The Annotated Lolita
- Pullman, Philip; The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

All of these are sat in a little pile beside the sofa along with a couple of notebooks and a copy of Greg Grandin’s Fordlandia, as yet unopened. This sort of book-cairn is not uncommon, and they’re the source of quite a bit of guilt whenever I’m in the same room; they exert a kind of magnetic field of guilty feeling which grows in strength as their mass increases. I am a terrible reader and literary monogamy is beyond me.

This kind of undisciplined reading ethic is infinitely worse online. Putting aside the discussion about reading off a screen versus paper*, the biggest obstacle to my reading at length on the web is the knowledge that I could be reading something else. Whilst reading (and enjoying) a Guardian editorial I’ll come across a reference to something which sparks my interest, let’s say for example something about ancient China. Before I know it I’ll realise that I’ve scanned the next two paragraphs without absorbing anything because my brain has been busy formulating the best Wikipedia search string to help me find information on feudalism in the Zhou Dynasty. A couple of keystrokes and I’m there, and I’ll never return to the Guardian article to finish it.

When the Guardian iPhone app came out I installed it immediately and cancelled my subscription to the paper. There’s been a lot written about eReaders and tablet computers saving the newspaper industry, and having selections from the Guardian in my pocket seemed like an excellent first step. But I should have known that I can’t be trusted to be my own editor. The first thing I did within the Guardian app was to customise the sections that download for offline reading: Top Stories, Culture, Music, Film, Technology. Straight away I had narrowed my focus, and I quickly came to miss the wonderful happenstance of opening the paper to find stories I knew nothing about and would otherwise never have found.

One of the most interesting voices I’ve come across in the debate about the future of ‘digital magazines’ is from the publisher Bonnier.

This concept video for Mag+ doesn’t just show a very pretty possible future for magazine publishing, it also displays an understanding of what makes magazines (and newspapers) unique and important: they are assembled and intended to be read as finite publications rather than endlessly interconnected instances in an ever-growing, ever-changing sea of information. That format takes a lot of distractions out of the equation. Choices are limited to a selection of articles vetted for quality and put together by editors with an eye on cohesion. I can skip one piece and read the next, but I’m not going to skip out to Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon, Wolfram Alpha…. Downloading that kind of virtual publication for offline reading may prove to be an enjoyable, rich experience but it is still some way away.

Only it isn’t. That kind of experience is available from any newsagent. The Guardian app will stay on my iPod Touch and guardian.co.uk will stay in my bookmarks but neither is a substitute for the paper itself and the experience it delivers: expertly curated and presented beautifully every day in the Berliner format and Guardian Egyptian typeface.

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* I happen to be in the camp that believes there is something unique about reading off paper which cannot be re-created on a screen. Electronic ink gets closer but still lacks tactility, font versatility and (often) proper pagination.