It’s always kind of interesting to see a news outlet develop a product; it’s an unusual combination of the news vendor being sufficiently well-placed to recognize deficiencies in the market yet at the same time wanting to remain impartial. More recently, Good e-Reader — one of the biggest names in digital publishing news — launched an Indiegogo project concerned with the development of a pair of new enterprises designed to make e-book reading easier and more convenient.

The products in question dovetail into one larger project: first is the HTML5 Cloud Based Reader, a reader designed to work with e-books available from most vendors and any HTML5-compatible browser. The HTML5 Cloud Based Reader would also offer up a variety of extra features, including note taking, highlighting certain passages, conferring with a dictionary in the app itself, and the ability to change both font type and font size, a welcome development for those with visual limitations.

Additionally, Good e-Reader is also out to develop a Cloud Storage Solution for e-books, allowing readers to buy various titles on various bookstores —Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Kobo, etc — that have paid DRM purchasing capability, as well as for those bookstores that use Watermarks like TOR or the more recently opened Pottermore.

This combination of useful features looks to be a sound one indeed; not only does it make it easier for users to get all their e-books in one place, but it also makes them easier to work with in general. Students will no doubt appreciate the ability to get textbooks on e-book format and carry just one reader to all their classes — and home for homework and study as needed — rather than carrying around a pile of paper everywhere they go. Authors, meanwhile, get the ability to share more of their work in a bid to get more interested readers, and more readers who will come back for more, hopefully with their wallets in hand.

This isn’t the first time that a news outlet has had a hand in product development, though; horror news outlet Bloody Disgusting, for example, has a line of movies it produces and distributes, Bloody Disgusting Selects. They don’t do that by themselves, though, as they work with The Collective and AMC Pictures to get those out. Some may find this something of a breach of journalistic integrity, while others may find it a matter of a location of clear expertise in a subject area — horror movies for Bloody Disgusting and e-books for Good e-Reader — stepping in to fill what it perceives as a hole in the market.

Good e-Reader is out to get $35,000 from Indiegogo for the development of its new products, and given that, at last report, it’s up to a meager $10, it’s clear they’ve got a long way to go before they get to their goal. But they have 40 days to get there, so Good e-Reader may be ready to bring a new reader and cloud storage locker with an HTML5 edge to both in the near future.