Only a year and a half ago, Steve Jobs peed all over the idea of building an iPod-like device for reading. "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is," he famously said. "The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."

Since that time, we've had evidence that the problem with reading may be a migration away from sources of the printed word. The computer has made writing more accessible to readers in the sense that one can leap quickly from magazine to newspaper to obscure research report and back to a blog, but the device is too stiffly formal to re-create the intimate and essential bond between reader and text.

Desktop and laptop computers alike keep the keyboard between the reader and the read. Worse still, they require one to assume a position—upright and adjusting the body to accommodate the device instead of adjusting the device to accommodate the person—that too often reminds the reader of being at work. The Kindle's victory, more than anything else, may have been to break through this barrier. But that success might not have been possible without the prior success of the smartphone, especially Apple's (AAPL) iPhone.

The iPhone changed two big things about the way we approach information and entertainment. It personalized our relationship to news by shrinking the information outlet into a pocket-size platform we can constantly consult. That ubiquity replicates the attachment many readers feel for books, magazines, and newspapers. How many of us carry around something to read as much as a talisman of broader engagement as means to keep boredom at bay?

The iPhone also created the app, a Chiclet-size portal into another world. And the app is changing the way we think about information, but it is also creating an opening for the information and entertainment brands, especially magazines and books.

With 50,000 apps available and a new iPhone operating system on its way, a new kind of software hero has emerged—the app-trepreneur. In the reading space, a tiny New York-based company called Scrollmotion stepped into the spotlight last week at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference as Josh Koppel bounded on stage to promote the company's new Iceberg reader. (A video of the event can be viewed here.)