Reading on the Web

Dan Misener

It's a paradox. There's a ton of great stuff to read on the web, but generally speaking, the experience of reading stuff on the web is terrible.Chances are, if you're reading these words in a web browser they're surrounded by a bunch of extraneous junk: up top, weather and advertisements; to the right, related links and additional headlines; and inline, on the left, a photo of me.
The ads may help defray the cost of publishing this page, and the dozens of hyperlinks may drive traffic to other pages of CBC.ca, but none of these things really help you focus on the intended act of reading these words. Popups, superfluous sharing widgets, and overly-paginated articles all fit into a particular category of digital cruft that, as an homage to Edward Tufte, I call "webjunk."

Enter Readability.

Created by consulting firm Arc90, Readability began life as a free JavaScript bookmarklet with a single purpose: to eliminate webjunk. After adding it to your browser's bookmark list, a single click strips a web page of its formatting, laying it out as a single column of clean, readable text. Readability strips advertisements and other elements from web pages. I've been using the original incarnation of Readability for more than a year now, and while it's not perfect, it makes reading long articles and blog posts much more pleasant. It's earned a coveted place in the bookmark bar of all my browsers.

So, I was excited to learn that this past week, Arc90 launched a new version of Readability. The original free version remains, but a new subscription-based paid version adds time-and-device-shifting capabilities, and most interestingly, a novel way to support content creators by sharing part of your monthly subscription fee with them. In its developers' words, Readability has graduated from a "basic web reading tool to a full-blown reading platform."

First, time-and-device-shifting. I don't know about you, but this happens to me all the time: a friend or colleage sends a link to an interesting article or blog post, but I don't have time to read it immediately. The new version of Readability joins services like Instapaper and Read It Later in allowing me to save articles to read later, conveniently stripped of ads and clunky formatting. All three services sync across multiple devices, letting me access saved articles in a web browser, on my tablet, or on a mobile phone.

The ability to better manage when, where, and how I consume web content has almost completely changed the way I read.The ability to better manage when, where, and how I consume web content has almost completely changed the way I read. Now, when my wife emails me a link to a blog post about getting a French visa in the middle of the day, I can simply click "Read Later" and know that a clean, junk-free copy will be waiting for me on my iPad later in the evening, when I'll have time to read it carefully.

But for me, the most interesting new aspect of Readility is its payment system. In a blog post, Readability creator Richard Ziade says, "we wanted to leverage the platform to support the writers and publishers people enjoy on the web today. In other words, we wanted to tie a mechanism that supports publishers to the act of reading."

Here's how it works. Each subscriber pays a monthly fee (the minimum is $5 US, though you can set it for as much as you'd like). Thirty per cent goes to Readability's developers, and 70 per cent goes to web publishers, divided up based on each subscriber's reading activity. For instance, if half the articles I de-junkify are from cbc.ca, then cbc.ca gets $1.75 of my $5 monthly fee.

Micropayments

The model at work here is one of micropayments, and Readability's use of it is particularly interesting in an online publishing landscape that's largely ad-supported, or, like News Corp.'s The Daily, subscription-based. The optimist in me wants to believe these tools will be a meritocratizing force, with the spoils going to the highest-quality blog posts and articles.Despite generating a lot of buzz in the late 1990s, micropayments never really took off as a method for selling online content. It'll be interesting to see if Readability's pay-per-percentage twist will prove successful. Back in 2009, a company called Kachingle started a service with a similar model, and to be honest, I've never knowingly stumbled upon a Kachingle-enabled site out in the wild.

As a consumer, I love the flexibility that services like Readability, Instapaper, and Read It Later offer. In the case of the new Readability, I also get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that in some small way, web content creators are compensated when I read their content. But it's not a perfect system. Attention and intention are notoriously difficult to measure online. Just because I click "Read Later" doesn't mean I will read something later. Just because I read something, doesn't mean I want to support the person who wrote it (Readability does provide a mechanism to undo contributions before the end of any calendar month).

The optimist in me wants to believe these tools will be a meritocratizing force, with the spoils going to the highest-quality blog posts and articles. The pessimist in me recognizes that the most popular content online isn't always the best content online, and worries that with the introduction of micropayments, these reading services will become crude popularity contests — or just another system for search-engine optimization (SEO) experts to game.

On the other hand, I wonder how publishers will react to this. Readability, after all, provides a service that strips out ads, charges a subscription fee, and keeps 30 per cent, all of this built on top of other people's content. Even if they get a cut, I can understand why some publishers might not like this situation.
Whether the new Readability turns out to be a success or not, I think it points to how reading on the web has changed. Today, I want my text on-demand, in the same way I want my movies, music, and TV on-demand. I want the things I read to fit around my schedule and the devices I prefer. I want to pick when, where, and how. And if it all possible, I want to avoid spinning, dancing, animated banner ads that keep me from actually reading.

(Dan Misener is a national technology columnist for CBC Radio afternoon shows, and one of the minds behind Spark, with Nora Young.)
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2011/02/08/f-misener-readability.html#ixzz1Da2lOpbX