Readability

» see readability.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i never used Readability as an app, but i have used its ghost more times than i can count. every time i tap reader mode in a browser and a wall of ads and popups collapses into plain text, some of that is descended from what Readability figured out. the product is dead. the thing it did survived by being copied into everything.

Readability started in 2009 at a new york studio called Arc90, first as a simple bookmarklet. you clicked it, and it reformatted whatever article you were reading into clean type with the junk stripped out. it worked so well that Apple licensed the underlying approach for Safari's Reader feature in 2010, which is how a small studio's side project ended up inside hundreds of millions of iphones.

the bookmarklet grew into a full read-later service with apps, competing with [[pocket]] and Instapaper. Readability's twist was idealistic. it charged users a monthly fee and sent about seventy percent of it back to the writers and publishers whose articles people saved. the intention was to pay the people making the thing everyone else was reading for free.

~ the record ~

~ the fall ~

the model pleased no one. publishers saw a company charging money on top of their work and resented being handed a cut they had not asked for, and much of the collected money went unclaimed. Apple's app store rules skimmed thirty percent off every subscription anyway. Readability made the read-later experience feel good and never made it pay.

~ the day it died ~

the read-later apps all faced the same trap, and by 2016 the shakeout came. Pocket ended up inside Mozilla and Instapaper was bought by Pinterest, but Readability found no buyer at all. it announced the end in a short medium post and shut the service down on 30 september 2016, refunding what it could and pointing users elsewhere.

~ what came after ~

the app is gone and its saved articles are dust, filed next to [[pocket]] and [[readmill]] on the shelf of tools built to save the web for a later that rarely came. but Readability got the ending the others did not. its cleanup engine outlived the company by more than a decade, running silently inside the reader mode of the browser you probably have open right now. the business failed. the idea is on every phone.

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