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Mobile Ebooks, Self-publishing, Digital Storytelling

5 Instances You May Need Help from Readability

Many people suffer from Internet distractions and Readability is a one-stop solution to fight them. It’s a trending service which helps turn the Internet into a place where you can focus on reading. I’ve covered it already and I’m going to write at least one more post about how it can be used by writers.

Yesterday I’ve signed up to a service as I’m ready to pay $5 a month to get the content I want in a way I prefer. And a way I prefer is: free from distractions.

The most important, rule-changing feature is free, though. Readability can instantly turn any web page into a reading friendly mode. All what you need is either a browser add-on or a bookmarklet. To give you the feel of how it works, you can use the button at the top right corner of this post.

What you probably don’t know is that Readability’s codebase is embedded in a host of applications, including Apple’s Safari 5 browser (the Safari Reader feature), the Amazon Kindle and popular iPad applications like Flipboard and Reeder.

Why would you need this? Readability is a promise to reduce the clutter and stays at the back of a head as a guarantee to peaceful reading whatever the site you land on. It’s all about those quick, almost unconscious decisions about which content to jump into. Thousands of such decisions we make every day – and they influence the trails we acquire knowledge. We may miss great opportunities to find or learn something just because of the fact it’s stuck in a cluttered space.

If you realize you behave in any of the ways described below, you may consider to use Readability.

1. You scroll through the text of the article

It becomes a frightening standard of our Internet activity. We open a site and start to read an article but after a first sentence we apply a “scroll mode” – jump to beginnings of paragraphs, photos, links or comments. Besides flashing banners there are other things which discourage from reading. It could be a font which is too small or a page load time which is too long or the general design of a site.

The alternative is to click on a Readability button and you have the text displayed in a clean interface, what’s very important – the interface you can personalize.

2. You don’t open a link to a site because you know it’s crowded

How many times have you seen on Twitter a title of an interesting article and you didn’t open because you know that a site delivers a great content but it’s also packed with banners and other stuff? Having Readability installed can help you click and read the article which might eventually be very helpful for you.

3. You share a link without reading the content

It’s the worst thing which can happen – trying to become an expert without learning what you share. I must admit from time to time I behave like that, even when I check my social media streams on a computer. Again, the reason is simple: I want to avoid clutter. With Readability I can avoid clutter and read the content.

4. You don’t open feeds which show article snippets

Some sites, like The Wired or The New York Times don’t show full-length articles in their feeds. You either need to visit a site (check instances 1, 2, 3) – but probably you don’t want to, because you’re in your RSS reader, which is another way to calm down the Internet roar. You may skip the article, and that’s bad, or you may visit a site knowing that Readability can bring the peacefulness of the RSS reader.

Another good example of how to deal with snippet feeds is the way Readability is incorporated into Reeder, a great RSS reading app for iOS. You simply click the Readability button and the feed shows the article in full length.

5. You don’t read articles saved for later

Many people, including me, save for later articles found on the net. We use tools like Instapaper and Read it Later. Then, usually in the evening, we come back to reading – without all the clutter of the sites where articles were originally published.

The thing is, that news travels fast, so when I sit with my iPad at the end of a day, I have a choice: to read an article saved in the morning or new articles showing up in my Reeder app – and surely there are hundreds of them.

Saving articles for later gives a nice reassuring feeling “it won’t be lost”, but in many cases people just don’t come back and read. It’s just an illusion. “If you don’t read it now, you’ll never read it” – this is what I’m saying to myself more often than ever before.

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I hope the list could help you define your own way to consume the information. Please share your thoughts in the comments.