Readlists

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

~ the eulogy ~

Paste a list of links. Get back a book. That was the entire product, and in May 2012 it felt like somebody had finally noticed what people were doing with their twenty open tabs.

Readlists came out of Arc90, the New York shop that had built Readability, the parser that pulled the prose out of a web page and threw away the navigation and the ads. Readability itself was a read-it-later service competing with Instapaper and Pocket. Readlists was the curatorial cousin: instead of saving an article for yourself, you assembled a set of them into an ordered collection, and then the thing became an actual file. Each article arrived as a chapter. You could download it as EPUB for iBooks or as MOBI, or have it mailed straight to your Kindle address.

You did not need an account. That was unusual in 2012 and it is close to unimaginable now. You could use your Readability login if you had one, but nothing required it, so a Readlist was a thing you could build in four minutes and hand to somebody as a URL. Teachers assembled course packets out of it. Bloggers turned a long argument spread over nine other people's posts into one object you could read on a train.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

The timing was precise. The Kindle was at its cultural peak and the tablet-reading habit had badly outrun the tools for feeding it. Everyone had a reading backlog and no good way to move it onto the device where they would actually read it. Readlists sat exactly in that gap, and because the heavy lifting was already done by the Readability parser, Arc90 could ship it as a weekend-shaped project rather than a company.

Being a side project is the whole story of how it ended, though. Readlists never had a business model of its own. It was a demonstration of what the parser could do, attached to a subscription service that was supposed to pay for everything.

~ what got buried with it ~

Readability announced on 12 July 2016 that Readlists would close at the end of that month, and told users to export their collections before the deadline. The site then went dark roughly a week early. People who had taken the announcement at face value and planned to export at the weekend arrived to find nothing to export from. The archived captures bracket it the same way: readlists.com is captured at full size on 4 July 2016 and the next capture of any kind is February 2017, by which time the page is a few hundred bytes.

The parent service followed within months. Readability shut its bookmarklet on 10 September 2016 and killed the API on 10 December. The reason given for the consumer side was simply that too few people were using it, which was true and was also what happens to a paid reading service in the years when Pocket was free and Safari had shipped its own reader.

The category was mine, for what it is worth. I have been an engineer with a reading backlog and a device to move it onto for twenty years. This specific tool circulated mostly through American tech blogs and the Apple press, and by 2012 the habit I had already settled into was the browser's own reader view, which was worse and did not need a service that could be turned off.

~ the inheritance ~

In 2021 a developer named Jim Nielsen rebuilt it, having spent five years intermittently wishing it still existed. His version does the same job from a browser without a backend to shut down, which is the correct lesson to have drawn.

readlists.com itself answers today, and for about one second you think it came back. The title tag still says "Home - Readlists". Underneath is three hundred kilobytes of machine-generated keyword spam, a wall of misspelled search terms and phone numbers, the standard fate of a domain whose name still carries a little traffic.

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