The New Readability Has Ambitious Future

Readability, the Javascript library that stripped websites of unnecessary graphics and elements to provide the user with a simple, easier to read page, has today revealed the next step in it’s future. The ambition plan includes fundamental new advancements including; usage on mobile devices, saving Readability-enhanced pages, social features, a subscription service that supports writers and a partnership with Marco Arment’s Instapaper.

One of the biggest new features of the new Readability is it’s subscription service which is a new model that aims to give back to the writers and publishers that you read from. The subscription starts from $5 but can be as high as you want to pay, and 70% go back to writers and publishers, so obviously the more you pay the more goes back to the content creators. There will still be the basic Readability which does not require a subscription.

Jump the break for full details.

The partnership with Instapaper and Marco Arment is also particularly noteworthy. Firstly Marco will become an advisory to Arc90, the company behind Readability. Secondly Instapaper will be able to send logs of your reading activity to Readability in order for that subscription to also fund those links sent through Instapaper. Lastly is a Readability iOS app that is based upon Marco’s Instapaper app.

The Readability iOS app will have a list of your articles marked for reading and being based upon Instapaper will be very similar. The app has already been submitted to Apple for approval so is likely to be released sometime in the next week or so.

Further additions to Readability is the ability to share your reading list with friends and followers, sharing individual readability enhanced links via Facebook, Twitter or Email and as previously stated, the ability to save articles for later reading. Publishers, writers and bloggers will also be able to implement various Readability features directly into their website using a suite of tools that have been released.

Readability has been a wildly succesful service, ending up most notably as a feature in Apple’s Safari browser, Amazon Kindle and more recently the Reeder suite of applications. So what are your thoughts on the new Readability? Are you going to sign up for the subscription?

[Via Readability Blog]