I missed yesterday’s New York Tech Meetup. I’ll be fine.
However, I would have liked to have seen the Readability demo and learned more about this company’s plans.
Their FireFox plug-in de-clutters a typical web page, removing graphics, Flash, and other visual ephemera leaving you with just the nutritious text.
The software was reviewed by David Pogue in November 2009. And it ended that year with a coveted Pogie Award.
Since the Pogie, Readability added some new features to boost the original text-centric idea. And then in a move that as far as I’m concerned nailed their dedication to the written word, they’ve installed a micro-payment system for authors.
I gave it a try this morning, and the software delivers as promised. You get a continuous, commercial-free stream of text. Their in-the-clouds software then adds some side bars that allow you to adjust the font-size, color, and column width of the resulting page—presumably some jQuery magic is being performed.
They’ve also taken a page from Nick Carr, and removed distracting links, replacing them with footnote numbers that point to a reference section that appear at the article’s end.
Paul Allen’s recent Vanity Fair article in Readability
All very nice, for the readers.
For authors and publishers, Readability now lets visitors make payments every time they use their software on a web page. Readers open up an account, and put a few dollars (minimum 5) into the meter—currently Amazon’s payment system.
Then when a reader uses their decluttering service, a portion of the account money is allocated to the site. Of course, the author has to open up an account as well, and register the domain with Readability to receive payments.
This startup has created a market for readers and writers, taking a broker’s fee, currently a healthy 30%, for their troubles.
In the Readability model, altruistic strangers are paying the bills. But Readability has made these micro-payments so painless that it doesn’t hinder and, in fact, practically encourage spontaneous acts of generosity.
Readability and services like it may point the way to a middle ground between open web sites and pure subscription models.
Final quibble: For my tastes, Readability’s fees could use some slimming down.
Related articles
- The Pogie Awards for the Year’s Best Tech Ideas (nytimes.com)
- Readability
