Online Reading Was a Pain – Until Now

I don’t know anyone that enjoys reading online. For most, it’s a necessary evil. Many prefer to print longer articles to paper for easier reading. But that can get expensive and is a problem if you’re environmentally conscious. Here are 2 great tools that can make online reading fun easier.

The first problem is that the Web wasn’t designed with readability in mind. The resolution of most monitors is far below what’s needed for comfortable reading. The second problem is the conflicting priorities of website design, nicely detailed here by FilterJoe (http://www.filterjoe.com/2009/03/23/site-design-for-reading/). The result of these conflicting priorities can often be a (very) distracting website. Between the page title, headlines, navigation, links and advertising, the content of the page gets lost. On top of that the content may not be formatted to be easily read.

Luckily others have seen these problems and created some very useful, and free, solutions.

These solutions strip out most everything from the Web page except the content, and then reformat that content for easier reading. For the most part these applications should work in any browser that supports Javascript. None of these products work well on all web pages, however. There’s simply too much variability in the design, coding, etc.

I’ve looked at a number of different solutions. These 2 are my top choices. While I have worked with these 2 products, I haven’t done extensive testing.

Readability
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
Readability allows you to configure several choices such as background color, text size column width and others using a piece of sample text. One of the choices is ‘style,’ meaning do you want the content formatted like a newspaper, novel, e-book, etc? I think this is a very smart question to ask as any style chosen makes a number of formatting changes without asking the user to think about them individually.

Then you’ll be asked to drag the bookmarklet up to your browser’s bookmark toolbar.

When you visit a Web page and see an article you’d like to read, simply click on the Readability link.

I find this solution to the online reading problem to be well thought out and easy to use.

Here’s a video to see Readability in action:
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3445774&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Readable

http://readable-app.appspot.com/

Much like Readability, Readable asks the user to choose some settings and drag the bookmarklet up to the browser’s bookmark toolbar. The number of choices is quite extensive as Readable doesn’t use the ‘style’ idea to combine and streamline the configuration process. Otherwise Readable is fairly similar in use to Readability.

Readable too has a video: http://www.youtube.com/v/cnnKFGqZOOA&hl=en&fs=1&fmt=22

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Tagged as: online reading