You probably know an iPhone owner or two who just can’t wait to demonstrate their favorite application. There has been much written about the booming market of apps and how they can change your lifestyle.

But a fairer assessment is that the iPhone is a device for the polymath. Virtually any fascination is enriched with an app. Marathon racing? Try RunKeeper, which tracks your distance and time using GPS. An art lover? Yours, Vincent from the Van Gogh Museum, with its galleries and archival letters, can’t be missed. Stargazing is never the same once you’ve got Pocket Universe, an augmented reality app that points out the constellations overhead as if there were no fog or clouds obstructing your view. Even some of the sillier seeming apps, like Flashlight, really come in handy while looking for a seat in a movie theater.

But after looking into many apps, I have come up with the best of the best regarding “receiving content to read”. This keeps you on top of events and newsworthy stories from around the globe.

Instapaper (Free)
Ever come across something you would really like to read, but don’t have the time? Instapaper provides an easy way to save articles for you to read at a more convenient moment. After creating an account, you download a button for your browser. Any time you click the bookmarklet, Instapaper saves the text on a website in a readable format, stripped of ads and images. It is easy to download your saved articles to your iPhone and read them on the train ride home, or whenever you have a few extra minutes. Instapaper is widely used – and loved. Wired’s Dylan F. Tweney once wrote on the Gadget Lab blog that Instapaper “just about justifies the phone’s purchase price all by itself.” Also be sure to have a look at Instapaper’s most frequently bookmarked articles at Give Me Something to Read. It is an eclectic list of magazine articles and short fiction from publications like The Atlantic, Seed magazine, and The New Republic.

Newsstand ($4.99)
With an aggregator like Newsstand, you “subscribe” to your favorite publications so you can read them all in one place. Simply type in the names of websites that you like to read and it will alert you to fresh content. Newsstand has a mock newspaper interface for reading headlines and articles. Many newspapers and blogs even display their full articles in this format, known as “RSS,” so you can read everything in the app without waiting for Safari to load. Newsstand is best for casual use; with more than about a dozen subscriptions, the app may feel overwhelming. And use care when subscribing to large publications, like BBC News, or you will be flooded. Instead of a publication’s main feed, you might want to subscribe to specific sections like “Science & Environment,” which, in the case of the BBC, averages about 50 updates in a week.

Stanza (Free)
The Kindle may have a longer battery life and E Ink, but the iPhone has an even greater advantage as an eReader – it’s almost always with you. While the small screen may not be ergonomically ideal, the iPhone’s portability means that at a moment’s notice you can download and start reading any digital book available online. The iPhone touchscreen makes reading a seamless experience. And if you choose a public domain literary classic, it won’t cost you anything.

Of the several free eReader apps, Stanza is the finest. It is the easiest to customize, offering dozens of options to change fonts, size, brightness, and color for the most ideal reading interface. Tapping on any word prompts a dictionary definition and gives Stanza an edge over Barnes & Noble’s eReader and the Kindle for iPhone. Even purchasing a book is less complicated on Stanza, which provides fast access to several sources other than Stanza’s parent company, Amazon.

NPR (Free)
In July of last year, National Public Radio released all its material online so that anyone with enough technical savvy could build applications using the network’s vast archives and streaming audio. Shortly after, a formidable unofficial NPR app emerged called NPR Addict. The official NPR app quietly debuted last summer. Have you made the switch? You should. The official app is remarkably robust, with a sleek interface for searching by show, topic, or station.