Readability’s new service is a great way to support your favourite websites while making web pages easier to read. It looks awesome.
The basic service
Readability lets you visit any web page and view it free of ads, oversized header graphics, and all the crap that big websites put on their pages to distract, irritate, and prevent you from enjoying their content. Making a page readable is simple: just click the ‘read now’ button the service adds to your web browser. Here’s what it does:
Original version:
Readability version:
The new service
From today, you can pay a small monthly fee to support the service (you choose how much). But here’s the killer feature: Readability now tracks which websites you read and pays part of your subscription fee to that site’s owner.
How it works
Readability uses 30% of your subscription fee to support their service, then divvies the remaining 70% between the sites you visit each month. To support a site, just click Readability’s ‘Read Now’ or ‘Read Later’ buttons when you visit that site. If you click one site a month, they get the full 70% portion of your fee. If you click more than one, it’s split up accordingly.
There are two account types:
‘Readers’ can sign up here to use the Readability service and support sites they visit. You can beautify the page to read it now, or mark it to read later and store it in your reading list. From there, you can archive articles or mark them as favourites — the service doubles as a handy bookmarking system.
‘Publishers’ can claim their sites here. I’ve already claimed this one; it’s a simple three-step process. The publisher control panel displays a list of pages that Readability subscribers have read. Publishers get paid twice a year, and can add discreet widgets and tools to their sites to encourage visitors to use Readability and support them.
If you want to sign up to be a reader and a publisher, you need to log out of your publisher account to sign up for a reader account using a different email address.
If you still don’t understand what the fuss is about, see the intro here.
The future
Marco Arment is about to release a special Readability-branded version of his Instapaper app, to let iPhoners catch up with their web reading on the go while supporting their favourite writers. Users of the existing Instapaper service will be able to send their reading logs to Readability, so that site authors still get paid. Personally, I’ll be switching to the Readability app — it makes sense to me to use one service instead of two.
I recently wrote that ‘we need a better way to support indie publishers’, and suggested a platform-based revenue sharing scheme as one solution. Less than two weeks later, someone’s launched one!
Any service that hopes to build and nurture an independent publishing ecosystem is well worth supporting in my view; I’m using Readability as a reader and publisher. Maybe you should too.
