Pocket, which was founded in 2007, raised $5 million in Series B funding in July and had said it would use the money to expand to more platforms.

Pocket for Mac features include offline access to saved content, “instant syncing across all devices, keyboard shortcuts, viewing of streaming video, the ability to share found content, and great organizing and search features.”

The reading experience on Pocket for Mac is fairly similar to that on Pocket’s other apps. There are also a couple of new features: You can re-download an article if it hasn’t loaded correctly, or “report article view” if something continuously fails to render. And you can save articles from the clipboard or using drag-and-drop.

On its blog, the company notes, “To create the new Mac app, we tapped into Pocket’s developer community. Michael Schneider, the creator of the popular third-party Mac app Read Later, joined Pocket to help us create this official Mac version of Pocket.”

The Dallas-based startup is doing this with the support of large publishers. The startup has already signed deals with Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Wiley, and is “finalizing” agreements with Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Hachette, along with other publishers. Ingram’s publisher clients can sign up directly or through Ingram.

A login workaround — not breaking DRM

BookShout founder and CEO Jason Illian explained to me — sort of — how the process works. The company’s app doesn’t break DRM on Nook or Kindle books. Rather, Ilian compared BookShout’s model to personal finance site Mint, which imports transactions from users’ bank accounts. Neither Mint nor BookShout relies on APIs (Amazon and Barnes & Noble don’t make their APIs public). Rather, to import books to BookShout users log in to the app with their Amazon or Barnes & Noble user name and password. The app verifies their purchases and then — if a consumer has bought a Kindle or Nook book from one of the publishers that BookShout works with — lets the user access the publisher’s version of the file through the app. These publisher files are protected by DRM.

“The great thing is, it’s just your book,” Illian told me, adding, “It’s not taking Amazon or Barnes & Noble’s sale. If you want to buy from them, great, keep buying from them.”

The advantage for readers is supposed to be the ability to integrate their ebooks with BookShout’s social reading capabilities — a goal that many startups have focused on, though it’s unclear that many readers actually desire these features.

The advantage for participating publishers, Illian says, is more data about their readers: “We want to be able to give information back to the publishers on how people are reading, where they’re shopping, what they’re sharing.” The Kindle and Nook book importing, though, doesn’t actually provide publishers with much information about their readers other than which platform they’ve bought a book on. Rather, BookShout’s hope is that publishers will choose to run promotions and let their authors interact with readers through the BookShout platform. BookShout is also selling ebooks directly — through its website, not its apps — and takes a cut of those sales. So far, most of the titles on BookShout’s website are Christian and religious titles from Thomas Nelson, which is now owned by HarperCollins.

“They said it was impossible”

It seems like only a matter of time before Amazon and Barnes & Noble shut down BookShout’s import function. “I think they’ll find us,” Illian told me, smiling. “I’ll be interested to see what Amazon thinks. My argument to them is, one, we’re not taking your sales, and, two, we’re not breaking any terms of service because we’re not taking any files from you. Will they try to shut it down? Maybe. Amazon is notorious for protecting their ecosystem. We’ll see how they react.”

What about Barnes & Noble? Illian leaned in close. “What do you think Barnes & Noble would do to have our technology?” he asked.

BookShout is ambitious — “They said it was impossible to import your books from Amazon and Barnes & Noble,” Illian bragged at Tools of Change Frankfurt Tuesday evening — but when I tested the import function through its iPad app (the function is not yet available on the BookShout website), it didn’t work at all for Kindle books. (I asked Illian about the problem in a follow-up email and was told that other users had been able to successfully import Kindle titles; as of this writing, BookShout was working to address my problem. but I wonder if Amazon has already moved to shut the function down.) The app appeared to login to my Amazon account successfully, but then I got a message saying “No books could be found to import.” (There are over 70 books in my Kindle account, including many from the publishers that BookShout says it is working with.)

The app was able to login to my Barnes & Noble account and showed the purchases I’ve made there, but because none of those purchases were titles from publishers working with BookShout, I couldn’t access them.

The app allows users to consume content in a number of ways, including a trending section that lets people see what’s popular on Twitter from the past hour. There’s also an option to access TimesWire, a firehose feed of all the content on NYTimes.com in reverse chronological order. Users can also view today’s stories by topic headings or see across all of the sections of the Times.

The limited nature of the web app suggests it is just a way for the Times to test the waters of HTML5 as it continues to develop its native apps. But it is noteworthy for a couple of reasons. By launching a web app, the Times can avoid paying Apple’s required 30 percent cut for in-app purchases on subscriptions. It also helps the Times improve on its “NYT Everywhere” initiative, which aims to make NYT content available on third-party platforms. And it also makes sense in light of  new Pew data that suggests news consumers are using the web over mobile apps.

The move follows similar steps by the Financial Times, which abandoned its native iOS apps last year to focus on HTML5. There was speculation that other publications would follow the FT’s lead, though that hasn’t really happened in a big way. The Boston Globe last year launched BostonGlobe.com last year as a paid HTML5-based web app. The Times was quick to point out that it’s not looking to skirt Apple’s rules on subscriptions.

“We wanted to test the web app among an engaged audience of NYT subscribers, which made the iPad a natural choice. This is the first step, but the HTML5 format does allow us to explore the idea of launching Web-based apps other platforms in the future,” a Times spokesperson told the Verge.

The web app doesn’t have the performance of the Times’ native app, but it gives the Times more options as it considers how it wants to distribute its content and how consumers want to consume it.