Here are six startups that offer new options to creators. Three of them — Periodical, 29th Street Publishing and Creatavist — let you create and sell mobile-friendly magazines, ebooks and newsletters; the other three — Postach.io, Ghost and Glipho — aim to let you blog in a new way.

All of the companies featured here launched in the past few months (or, in Ghost’s case, will launch later this summer), so they’re still working out some quirks and rolling out new features. What they have in common, though, is that they’re all trying to make writing and publishing easier and better. Check them out and let us know what you think (and which startups we should add to our list).

Periodical: Create and sell digital magazines

What you can do with it: Periodical, which allows users to create and sell publications — magazines, newsletters and so on — for a variety of platforms including Apple’s Newsstand, embraces Craig Mod’s model of subcompact publishing: the idea that digital publishing should be simple and that the works created should be very easy to read on smartphones and tablets. Cofounder Sean Stevens told me that most users of the platform use The Magazine, originally created by Instapaper founder Marco Arment, as a model.

What we like: It’s easy and relatively inexpensive to sell content through your own branded app.

Background and funding: Periodical, which is six months old, is one of the startups in Los Angeles-based incubator Launchpad LA, through which it’s received $100,000 in seed funding. Cofounders David Mancherje, Shahruz Shaukat and Stevens previously worked together at comedy podcast network Earwolf.

Platforms supported: Users create their publication — which can include text, photos and videos — on Periodical’s site, set the price and then publish it on the web or as an iOS app; the platform also supports delivery to Kindle. Android support is coming soon.

Number of users: N/A.

Cost: Free to create a web-only publication; $29/year for Kindle delivery; $99/year to create a custom-branded iOS app (the pricing will be the same for Android). In addition, Periodical takes a cut of a publication’s subscription revenue: 20 percent for subscriptions through the web, Kindle and Android, and 9 percent for subscriptions through Apple’s Newsstand (on top of the 30 percent fee that Apple charges).

Availability: In beta; get on the invite list here.

What’s next: Android support; more discovery features; a marketplace for Periodical titles.

Atavist’s Creatavist: Publish multimedia stories

What you can do with it: Create multimedia stories and publish them as apps, ebooks and for the web.

What we like: You can create a one-time project and push it out to the world. You don’t have to commit to publishing regularly or on a set schedule.

Background and funding: Creatavist, which launched in April, is the software that Atavist originally developed in order to publish its own e-singles. Atavist has raised $1.5 million in its first funding round and an undisclosed amount in a second round from Scott Rudin and Barry Diller’s IAC. (Atavist is providing the technology for Diller and Rudin’s yet-to-launch digital publishing house.)

Platforms supported: Web, iOS. Users can also export their works as ebooks and upload them to digital bookstores like Kindle.

Number of users: N/A, but companies working with Creatavist so far include NPR and corporations like the Four Seasons. Atavist CEO Evan Ratliff told me that a lot of photographers are also using the platform.

Cost: Free to create one story and publish it on the web and in Creatavist’s iOS app; $10 per month to create unlimited stories and publish them on the web and in Creatavist’s iOS app. An option to publish stories through your own branded iOS app and on the web is coming soon, with pricing starting at $250 per month.

Availability: Available now.

What’s next: Within the month, users will be able to sell their works through Creatavist’s app (right now, they can only give them away for free). Atavist will take a cut of the sales; that amount has yet to be determined.

29th Street Publishing: Publish mobile magazines

What you can do with it: Publish and sell web and iOS magazines as individual apps. 29th Street Publishing, like Periodical, embraces the subcompact publishing model.

What we like: 29th Street Publishing isn’t open to everyone, but because the company closely vets the publishers it works with, you know as a reader that you are getting high-quality content. And the vetting process forces publishers to come up with concrete publication plans. 29th Street also provides publishers with a custom-built iOS analytics platform.

Background and funding: The NYC-based 29th Street Publishing was cofounded by former Six Apart employees David Jacobs and Natalie Podrazik. Editorial director Blake Eskin was previously web editor at The New Yorker.

Platforms supported: iOS.

Number of users: 29th Street Publishing chooses which publishers to work with. Among the 12 publications currently available are The Awl’s Weekend Companion, New York Review of Books editor Ann Kjellberg’s Little Star Weekly, and Maura Johnston’s Maura Magazine.

Cost: 29th Street helps develop, design and build magazine apps for free and then takes a revenue share of subscriptions. It also licenses its CMS, app and analytics platform to companies that don’t want to do a revenue share or that want to put out a free magazine (like ProPublica).

Availability: It’s not open to everyone; see above. “For us to work with someone, we want to make sure that their work makes sense for our platform, that they have an audience (or they have a clearly defined potential audience), and that we believe that they are going to make good on their commitment to subscribers,” cofounder and CEO Jacobs told me. “Over time, we’re going to open the platform up much more broadly, but we’re being selective for now as we focus on the product.”

What’s next: Maura Magazine will launch a web version this month, and Android versions of some titles are coming this fall. 29th Street even plans to experiment with print.

Ghost: Open-source, crowdfunded blogging platform

What you’ll be able to do with it: Publish a blog in a simple and elegant, open-source platform that provides more control over content than Tumblr but is simpler than WordPress. “It differentiates from Tumblr in being open source — which means you own your data, and you can control every part of the program (neither of which you can do with Tumblr),” founder John O’Nolan, a former WordPress exec, told me. “It differentiates from WordPress in being for bloggers. WordPress is a big complicated content management system that can power all sorts of websites. Ghost is just for blogs.”

What we like: The platform looks beautiful and has a one-stop dashboard that combines your blog’s traffic and performance data in one place.

Background and funding: Founded by former WordPress exec John O’Nolan, Ghost raised £196,362 (USD $298,627) in a successful Kickstarter campaign this spring (far beyond its £25,000 goal). Ghost will operate as a nonprofit software foundation.

Platforms supported: Web; responsive design will work on all devices.

Number of users: Ghost hasn’t launched yet, but 5,236 people backed its Kickstarter campaign.

Cost: Free; a paid hosted service will be available later this year.

Availability: Ghost should be available by the end of the summer.

Postach.io: Blog via Evernote

What you can do with it: Publish notes created in Evernote to a personal blog. “People who use Evernote are very passionate about Evernote,” cofounder Shawn Adrian told me, noting that the company’s seen a bunch of users switch over from Tumblr.

What we like: The fact that you can make a “curated” blog with all types of content — recipes, articles and so on — that you’ve saved to Evernote.

Background and funding: Two-month-old Postach.io is based in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Cofounders Shawn Adrian and Gavin Vickery previously built QuoteRobot, which is proposal and invoice-creating software for web designers, and Adrian describes that as their “bread and butter app.” They’ve received $200,000 in funding from Vancouver’s Full Stack Ventures. Evernote reached out after seeing Postach.io on Hacker News, and it’s a contestant in the 2013 Evernote Devcup.

Platforms supported: Web. Users tag notes for Postach.io — which can include text, audio, video, images and links, as well as Evernote Food posts and web clips — in Evernote and they’re automatically published to a blog. Users can also import their Tumblr to their Postach.io blog.

Number of users: 3,500.

Cost: Free, with a premium version planned.

Availability: In beta, available to anyone.

What’s next: Tighter integration with Evernote, pro themes, more sharing and discovery features, a premium version. Adrian said that the company is also talking with Evernote about referral fees when Postach.io users upgrade to Evernote Premium.

Glipho: Blog with built-in social features

What you can do with it: Create a blog, then publicize that blog through Glipho’s built-in social network. Users rank and highlight content, some of which is spotlighted on Glipho’s homepage. SEO tools are built in, and users can follow writers and topics they’re interested in.

What we like: The curation and recommendations provide a service for readers as well as writers.

Background and funding: The London-based Glipho launched its public beta in March and has 6 employees in the U.K. and one in the U.S.; it’s hiring three more employees in the U.S. to open a Boston-based office. Founder and CEO Roger Planes previously developed software and websites for journalists. The company has raised $750,000 in a seed round.

Platforms supported: Web; import existing blogs from Tumblr, WordPress and Blogger. Glipho has an Android app and is awaiting approval from Apple on an iOS app.

Number of users: N/A, but Glipho says it has users from 120 different countries who have published or imported over 150,000 blog posts.

Cost: Free.

Availability: Available now.

What’s next: Mobile app improvements and release of Glipho’s API.

OpenTable is now built into Evernote Food so that users can book reservations directly from the app, the company announced on its blog. They can share recipes on Facebook, Twitter and via email. And people who already used Evernote to store recipes, but weren’t using Evernote Food, can import those recipes from Evernote into the Evernote Food app.

Evernote Food has also made some content deals in Asia: “Evernote Food lovers in China and Japan will also now be able to search recipes from top regional publishers,” the company noted.

Evernote Food relaunched as an iOS and Android app last December, beefing up its discovery features like an “Explore Recipes” tab and Foursquare integration. In that way, the app aims to compete with other food discovery apps like Urbanspoon. The recipe storage and sharing features are its answer to recipe-focused apps like Say Mmm, Paprika and Gojee, and aim to take advantage of the fact that a lot of people already use Evernote to store recipes.

iSpeech gives publishers three options for creating content. They can convert PDFs to audio files; they can add a widget to a website that essentially adds a “play” button to an article; or they can use more sophisticated developer tools built on iSpeech’s API and add them directly to their web pages. Pearson is using the PDF option for its textbooks. Evernote is using the developer tools to integrate speech technology into its web reading platform Evernote Clearly. “The natural evolution of this is to potentially bring this functionality into all of Evernote’s products,” iSpeech COO Yaron Oren told me. “One of the things we hear directly from Evernote customers is they want to be able to listen to their Evernote notes in the car, so it would be great to have this kind of of functionality.”

The publishing platform’s business model is basically pay-per-use, Oren said, and the cost usually ends up totaling “less than a tenth of of the cost of professional narration.” For websites, iSpeech charges by the word, which varies depending on volume but ranges from $0.01 to a fraction of a cent per word. For books, the company charges by the page; there are volume discounts, but Oren said that in general, the maximum cost to convert a 250-page book to audio with iSpeech would cost around $1,000. “We’ve heard from publishers that a book with voice talent tends to cost in the order of $15,000 per book,” he said.

Amazon ran into legal trouble when, in 2009, it automatically added text-to-speech technology to ebooks. The company insisted that text-to-speech features don’t violate copyright, but said at the time, “We strongly believe many rights-holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat,” and decided to let rights-holders “decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title.” Oren says iSpeech will avoid those issues by leaving the decision to publishers — though it seems as if Evernote Clearly could potentially run into trouble, since it doesn’t hold the copyright to the articles that users save to its platform. (Evernote says it’s “comfortable” with the feature and is only running it on the article pages, not on articles saved into Evernote.)

For now, iSpeech’s publisher tools are primarily going to be of interest to nonfiction publishers — not publishers of, say, novels. “It’s a viable alternative to nonfiction, textbooks, or more straightforward news content,” Oren said. “For fiction, or other content where there’s more emotion and differences in reading style, this is not an alternative [yet].” But, he said, “this is about making more content available [as audio]. Professional voice talent is very expensive, and as a result, most books never get made into an audio format. Now there’s an option.”

CEO Marissa Mayer is slowly making her mark on Yahoo, and the addition today of Levchin to the board can probably be seen as a testament to Mayer’s faith in engineers and entrepreneurs. From the get go, we’ve heard Mayer, who was a former executive at Google, asked for more engineering talent at the beleaguered web portal. Just this last week some of her changes at the product level associated with adding new features to Flickr and other changes are coming to light. Levchin fits right in.

Yahoo had apparently been courting Levchin for a while, and it certainly needs a blast of innovation from someone known in the Valley for being thoughtful and well-versed in developing social startups. For more on Levchin, check out this post from 2010 featuring a video interview Om did with Levchin while he was still at Google.

Levchin also serves as chairman of the boards at Kaggle and Yelp and is a director at Evernote. Yahoo also said that Intuit CEO Brad Smith and Weather Channel CEO David Kenney are stepping down from the board, leaving Yahoo now with 11 directors.

The Kindle highlights feature lets reader select and “clip” favorite quotes and passages from the ebooks they are reading, then access those highlights online later. At launch, Findings’ main feature was the ability for users to easily share those Kindle highlights with others by syncing their Kindle account with the Findings’ web bookmarklet. Applications such as Evernote also let users sync and save their Kindle highlights.

Findings maintains that web clipping has become an increasingly important part of the service it provides, though Betaworks CEO John Borthwick acknowledged that the ability to share Kindle highlights was the reason many people started using Findings in the first place. He said that Amazon had known about Findings for a year and had been fine with the service until now. ”I don’t want to intuit what Amazon’s motivations are,” he said, but suggested that the decision was driven not by Amazon but by book publishers: “This is probably what publishers want.”

That sentiment is echoed in a blog post from Findings general manager Lauren Leto. “Amazon has to abide by what publishers demand, and this is sometimes at odds with what users want,” she writes. “As a small startup we had no choice but to comply with their demand that we discontinue the feature that allow users to import and sync Kindle data in Findings.”

I’ve asked Amazon for a comment, but does it makes sense that this decision would be driven by book publishers? They are already able to restrict Kindle highlighting: they have the ability to limit the amount of content clipped from an ebook (and Evernote users who wanted to save their highlights have been blocked from saving too much content). It makes sense that piracy-fearing publishers don’t want users to “clip” too much of a book and share it. Scanning the content shared on Findings, though, it’s clear that most users aren’t sharing more than a paragraph of text.

Amazon itself lets readers share their highlights and clippings through a feature called “Public Notes,” and it’s possible the company is cracking down on competing services like Findings in an effort to promote its own service. Considering that “Public Notes” is relatively under the radar, that seems somewhat unlikely. But the new Sony Reader lets users share passages through Evernote, and Amazon may be planning to make its own sharing features more robust.

Finally, Amazon simply may not want third-party apps accessing Kindle highlights. If so, we should expect to see services like Evernote cutting off that functionality soon.

I’ve seen Facebook sharing of digital content from an e-reader in the past, but as an Evernote user, this feature intrigues me:

“For the first time, Reader is combining features from Evernote to allow users to save their favorite web content to enjoy any time. Evernote’s Web Clipper allows saving content with a click, and pages saved with Evernote Clearly are optimized for Reader’s crisp E-Ink display. Favorite passages can also be annotated on Reader and saved back to Evernote for viewing later on any smartphone, tablet or PC.”

Adding Evernote support is a smart move by Sony and I anticipate others — namely, Amazon and Barnes & Noble — to follow with expanded sharing or web clipping options. Moving content to the cloud for later consumption on nearly any device is just one of the benefits brought by Evernote and it makes sense: Why read a long web page on a device that’s not optimized for the activity when you can clip it and read later on a better display? Likewise, the reverse option is appealing: I often use Evernote Clearly to clip the text of web pages and could use the new Sony Reader to view them later.

With the PRS-T2, Sony is also throwing in a free voucher for an e-book copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone through a partnership with Pottermore, making the Potter pot, that much sweeter for its new Reader.

Udini provides access to 150 million articles from 12,000 publications — including magazines, newspapers, trade journals, scholarly journals and wire feeds. Participating publishers include Springer, Nature Publishing Group, the Economist, New York Times, Washington Post, World Health Organization and Cambridge University Press. Users can also access ProQuest’s dissertation archive.

“Research libraries play a critical role in our knowledge economy, but not everyone who needs serious content is connected to a scholarly library. Research for these unaffiliated users is confusing and inefficient unless they know exactly what they’re looking for,” ProQuest SVP and GM Rich LaFauci said. “Premium information — when it’s accessible at all — is distributed behind many different paywalls all over the web. Udini curates and licenses high-quality content and makes it incredibly easy to discover, acquire and use.”

Most individual articles cost $0 to $3.99, with some “specialty materials” like books and dissertations $4.99 and up. Users can pay as they go or choose a “project pass,” $30 for 14 days with unlimited standard articles included and specialty articles 20 percent off, or a subscription for $30 a month.

Influenced by Evernote and Instapaper

As with Evernote, users can store articles and projects in Udini for free in a cloud-based personal, searachable library. They can store their own PDFs and other documents there along with any articles they buy from Udini. Taking a cue from services like Read It Later and Instapaper, Udini strips ads and banners from stored content to provide a “distraction-free” reading experience.

Springpad essentially uses bookmarklets, browser extensions and its mobile and tablet apps to grab information off the Web for later viewing, but unlike other note-taking apps, Springpad tries to structure that information and add context. For instance, if you “spring” a review of a restaurant or a movie, the service will recognize the information for what is, adding to your notes information about opening hours and local box office show times as well as links to dinner reservation or ticket purchasing services. Users then store all of those items in individual notepads, which they can make public to the whole Web or keep as private files.

The new update allows users to share their notebooks with one another, publicly or privately, similar to collaboration features on Evernote. For instance, a family could share grocery or to-do lists among its members. A book club can keep a running list of reading ideas and cooks can trade recipe ideas. Users can share notebooks privately among friends, or they can make notebooks public, allowing any Springpad member to follow another’s particular interest. The feature is particular useful, since I might be fascinated by one member’s recipe collection, but have no desire to read his collections of religious or political essays. The tools allow me to selectively follow what I find interesting and filter out the rest. Here’s a video Springpad produced to highlight the new features:

Like Pinterest, Springpad relies heavily on images to represent the items and notebooks, leading to a stunning visually layout within the application. But according to co-founder and business development VP Jeff Janer, Springpad is adding many more layers of contextual information to make the service into a sophisticated social collaboration tool.

“We want to form active micro-communities that revolve around particular interests,” Janer said. “Pinterest is focused on inspiration that may lead to a transaction, but there’s not really any collaboration there.” While Janer isn’t dismissing inspiration – which has made Pinterest an overnight success – he said Springpad sees a lot more potential in inspiration-oriented networking than in simply driving customers to retailer Websites, though such transactions are a key part of Springpad’s business model as well.

A mixed bag of revenue

Like Pinterest, Springpad takes a little off the top from any transaction originating from its notebooks, whether it’s a CD from Amazon or a movie ticket from Fandango. But Janer said Springpad’s primary business model will be based on advertising and offers. With detailed information about each user’s interests, Springpad’s advertisers can tailor specific coupons, based on the exact items they have stored in their notebooks. If you have saved a specific Sony HD TV in a gadgets notebook, Sony could ship you a discount offer specifically for that TV, Janer said.

Springpad has added a few other features with the new update as well. It’s introduced natural language understanding features to its search and item creation bar. So typing “Call Jeff tomorrow” into the add item bar will automatically generate a reminder task, which is then automatically synced with Google Calendar. It’s also generating alerts, based on items in stored in notebooks. If you a add a movie trailer, it will send you a notice when the film is available in your area and later generate another note when its is released on DVD and Blu-ray.

Springpad is still a relatively small operation. It launched in 2008 with funding of $7 million, and has since grown to 3 million registered users and a staff of 17. Much of that growth has been fairly recent driven by its mobile apps.

The Food app is essentially designed like a diary or blog template, and lets users create entries based around specific meals. They can upload pictures, get their locations automatically detected, and write down meal descriptions and recipes as part of the entry. All these elements can be left for your own private perusal, either through Evernote’s web app or through its apps; and they can also be shared via Facebook, Twitter and email.

Meanwhile, Evernote Hello works as a kind of interactive, dynamic Rolodex: it lets you record people’s faces, names and associations, as well as more basic contact details like email and phone numbers — with a quirky suggestion to allow people to photograph themselves with your phone if you trust them enough. If you get email addresses, then your details automatically get sent to them. The contacts you enter in Evernote Hello get stored in a database that you can then use to enhance with further meetings with those people (like a Salesforce service for the masses).

One drawback that I can see right away is that it’s not clear whether any of that information synchronises with your contact book on the phone itself; it looks like potentially you might end up with duplicate entries on your device for some people, as you do with other social networking apps.

Another drawback that applies to both of these apps is that they sound a lot like the food and productivity apps on the market today, which could make takeup challenging for the company.

On the plus side, what sets these apart is how Evernote will be combining their functionality to create something a little more powerful: the idea, it seems, is that someone using Evernote Hello might also be the kind of person who would open Evernote Food to record a meal and maybe also take a few notes using the main Evernote app. Evernote then takes these encounters are merges them in a kind of timeline to let users add more context to, say, a particular meeting with a person.

Used together, the apps make for a compelling — and, in this world of me-too apps, a more unique — approach to the idea of recording one’s life in a way that is more private, and in some respects more useful than, say, via Facebook, Twitter or Path.

In June 2011, Evernote announced that it had 10 million users signed up to its services, which gives it a respectable base from which to build out these new products. It will be worth watching whether Evernote picks up more users as a result of Food and Hello, and whether this is a sign of more vertical apps to come. As both apps are currently free, it will also be worth watching how Evernote eventually gets around to monetizing the offerings.

Armstrong launched Longreads, a feed of long stories “best enjoyed away from your desk” (long-form journalism, short stories, interview transcripts, historical documents, etc.), in 2009 as a Twitter feed and hashtag; a year later, he launched Longreads.com. Users share stories by tweeting them with the hashtag #longreads, and publishers like The Atlantic, Vanity Fair and The Awl now tag their longer pieces that way. The website lists the best of the stories and also includes a raw feed with all the stories being tweeted.

Read It Later, founded in 2007 by Nate Weiner, is an app that lets users save web content to one list to read or watch later. As of July 2011, it has over 3.5 million users. As its editorial advisor, Armstrong will be “working with publishers, curators and creators to help them use the platform in new ways,” he says. “Time-shifting, obviously, has been great for the revival of in-depth storytelling. So it seemed what we were individually working on was complementary.”

Read It Later competitors include Instapaper and, as reported by the NYT’s Bits today, a new service from Evernote called Clearly. Read It Later has the chance to stand out by adding additional editorial features to its offerings.

On the Longreads Tumblr, Armstrong says his site “will continue as it always has, serving our growing community of readers, curators, authors and publishers, and continuing to improve our service. There’s obviously a lot that we’ll be able to build with the help of the Read It Later team, and their support means we can continue to grow.”