Readability service to become free | Hacker News Reader

Readability service to become free

blog.readability.com

154 pointsandycroll61 comments

Unlike Marco Arment and Instapaper, Readability will now give their app away for free.

Founding partner Rich Ziade says the company is still "figuring out" their business model.

But the parser Readability created under the Apache license is being used by Apple and Amazon in millions of devices, neither of which pays a dime in licensing fees to this small startup.

He talks about it here - http://www.betabeat.com/2011/11/16/readability-focuses-on-fr...

Readabilities dream of a long form "slow" web that rewards publishers is noble, but they would be better equipped to build it if they had secured their business model early on.

Founding partner Rich Ziade says the company is still "figuring out" their business model.

That sounds ominous.

But the parser Readability created under the Apache license is being used by Apple and Amazon in millions of devices, neither of which pays a dime in licensing fees to this small startup.

Yup. That is what the Apache license is for. I'm a huge fan of open source but when you choose a license like that you should prepare yourself for the possibility that most people will use your code in the most unhelpful and exploitative way possible.

I'm using something called "Enjoy Reading" for Firefox (which also uses readability's code) since I'd rather have the formatting all happen in javascript without trying to access a remote server. It's quicker and I don't have to worry about whether or not they are logging every article I read.

The parser we're using now is not based on that JavaScript codebase at all. It's excellent to it being used in so many ways now, though.

We're all about making reading better on the web.

Are you using the lxml port or did you guys rewrite it again?

A completely rewritten stack. It's continually improving — one of our biggest efforts.

We do heavily utilize lxml though.

Given the number of articles I guess you're processing each day, I think you should probably rewrite your parser in C. I used to run a service which basically consisted on a feed reader where every article was preprocessed by an algorithm similar to readability. I wrote the parser using lxml and it looked fast enough, but when I started running on the 400K-500K pages per day territory I started having performance problems. Since parsing the pages is easily paralelizable across multiple machines, I could have just rented some more servers. But where's the fun in that? So I sat in front of the computer and 4 hours later I had a C implementation which passed all the testsuite and, according to valgrind, didn't have any memory leaks. As soon as I deployed it into production, CPU and memory usage dropped by something like 10x (don't remember the exact number) and I was able to remove some servers and bring the costs down. Sadly, I had to close that project because I was spending too much time on it compared to the revenue it was generating, but it was so much fun while it lasted.

Another anecdote: I was writing an HTML-to-text converter. The prototype used lxml and some custom DOM-traversal and formatting logic in Python. I got about a 17x speedup from porting the thing to use C and libxml2 (the parser that lxml uses). The port to C took most of an afternoon, and it's currently chewing through a lot of HTML without a problem.

I can confirm that libxml2 is indeed great.

I would love to use Enjoy Reading, but it is a non-starter for me until it works with noscript... :(

> But the parser Readability created under the Apache license is being used by Apple and Amazon in millions of devices, neither of which pays a dime in licensing fees to this small startup.

Presumably it attained that level of awesomeness due to the efforts of volunteers who donated their time to open source. That's the model -- no fair complaining a posteriori when your app blows up and people start making more money with it than you are. It was never "yours" to begin with.

(Not that Arc90 is doing this; in fact they seem to be going out of their way not to.)

I keep bouncing between Readability and Readable[1].

One thing I like about Readability is that it's not affected by saved zoom levels because it displays the converted page on its own domain. For example, if I have BBC News at 120% zoom – remembered by Chrome – Readability is still at 100% – or whatever I've set it to – whereas Readable uses 120% zoom.

[1]: http://readable.tastefulwords.com/

I've been using Readability legacy bookmarklet, but was never happy being redirected to their domain. Thanks for link to Readable.

On Chrome there's also the Readability Redux extension[1], which uses the old bookmarklet's code with a toolbar button.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jggheggpdocamneaac...

Looks like a movement toward being a direct competitor to Instapaper.

Unless it changed recently, Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, is an advisor to Arc90, the company behind Readability (http://www.marco.org/2011/02/01/readabilitys-new-service)

Marco is not currently listed in the advisor team at the bottom of their about page (https://www.readability.com/about). Would seem like a conflict at this point and makes sense for them to move in separate directions.

Doesn't seem incredibly surprising; Marco isn't really innovating effectively, and it's time to see the space build via competition.

I beg to differ. Instapaper 3.0 was an amazing step forward for the software.

Personally, I have found that Instapaper 4.0 (I assume this is what you meant when you referred to 3.0) has regressed. Archiving read stories, for example, used to be one click - now it's 2 or 3.

Automatic/background downloading fails sometimes, often I see articles unavailable (I don't often remember to check before I leave wifi/signal, so it's a pain to find this out when I expect it to work behind the scenes).

Marco's concept of darknet social networking/sharing is great in theory, if he were working for MS Research or something, but in reality, it's confusing and challenging: I want to share stuff with my wife and find it incredibly hard to know if it got there without having to bug her to find out. So we resort to emailing it back and forth - which completely breaks the model.

There's no semantic layering on top, exporting to the kindle is tricky (it wont, for example, guess that i've read an article exported to the kindle, and remove it from my list..)

I can't have it archive and send stuff to pinboard easily -- and if i want to do anything with the API, i better be prepared to pay a weird licensing fee.

As much as I want to support Marco, and I really do, he makes it really hard for me to be enthusiastic about what he ships, and I feel that his support sucks.

I'd bet 100$ he's reading this thread, but he won't engage - and that's really striking. I often wonder how things look from his ivory tower.

I'll second that. Instapaper 3.0 is incredible.

I use Readability and Instapaper for different things. With Readability, I use the Chrome extension to make articles readable in the same way Safari does on the fly.

With Instapaper, I save articles and read them later on my iPhone, and I get a collection of articles that I've saved sent automatically to my Kindle every Friday. Saturday mornings with my Kindle, saved articles through Instapaper and French Press coffee? Life is good.

Is Instapaper the only one with the read later offline feature? (versus Safari Reader and Readability)

In what way? I ask bc I agree with parent (and disagree with you), as far as the iPhone version of Instapaper is concerned.

Kind of surprising to me since the arc90 team worked with Marco for the original platform effort.

... and a response to Apple's move into this space

Marco doesn't seem to think Apple's service will challenge his business model for Instapaper much. Do you think Readability feels differently?

I developed this exact same tech earlier this year. It was a pain trying to analyze all the MANY different ways people can screw up html, but the success rate is pretty high across the net. I've been thinking of making it opensource since I no longer use it.

Please do.

I can't consider leaving Instapaper until Readability sends things to my Kindle weekly. Without that feature I'm unlikely to bookmark in Readability but quite likely to using Instapaper. I don't see how it can be done with the paywall they've set up, though.

We can send things to your Kindle daily.

Indeed you can :) Anecdotally, I didn't notice that capacity until you mentioned it here, though.

For a site named 'readability', the font they're using seems awfully thin and spidery. I need to selecting the text to comfortably read it, and my eyesight isn't bad.

Is it just me, or are anti-aliased web fonts these days harder to read than their normal equivalents?

I like readability and their idea that profit should go back to the publisher. But they never really tell you how this is suppose to work. As far as I can tell, each publisher has to register with readability to see any money. Clearly not "web scale" :)

Ironically, the parser developed by Readability under the Apache license is now used by Apple and Amazon. So the technology has gone web scale, even if the business hasn't...

http://www.betabeat.com/2011/11/16/readability-focuses-on-fr...

Actually, most bigger publishers and quite a few bloggers are already signed up with Readability, because it's just set-and-forget.

Also: "Yes, Readability keeps track of the last twelve months of pages visited even before a publisher registers with us to view their statistics. If your site has garnered traffic to Readability, we're already earmarking money for you."

Cool, but how do you know who signed up?

This is better than Instapaper.

Definitely, NTM Marco's childish anti-Android bias is just stupid. Like it or not, Android has the largest chunk of the smartphone market, and not supporting it out of an ideological bias is absurd.

For related reasons, it appears that the Readability app has only been released on iOS at the moment. I have no idea why on earth you would do this, but whatever. As long as they eventually release an Android app, the problem will be solved.

There is no "anti-Android bias." Marco is one man, and does not want to make and support an Android app in addition to making a web app, iOS app, and the backend to support the two.

There is also not a good profit motive for him. Android users, on average, not only use fewer apps, but especially buy fewer apps - very few paid apps on Android are as successful as iOS counterparts.

As for Readability, I use the excellent mobile web app. I will check out the iOS app, I suppose, but for Android phones the web app should be fine.

I agree that Marco's decision not to develop an Instapaper app for Android doesn't itself reflect an anti-Android bias. There are plenty of good reasons that could be behind that decision.

However, if you think Marco himself isn't full of anti-Android bias and contempt, you haven't been paying attention. Check out his Twitter feed. Or his blog. Aaron Pressman at The Orange View has captured more than a few examples (as have others, I'm sure).

Marco likes to talk about how he hasn't seen a good Instapaper Android app and how that "proves" there's no market for him on Android (conveniently dismissing the official ReadItLater app, not to mention the pile of apps using the ReadItLater API that preceded it).

Personally, I think there's a much simpler explanation: Any developer working on an Instapaper Android app couldn't help coming across Marco's opinions on Android. At that point, I'd expect most good Android developers would decide that they had better things to do than to writing an app for a platform their API provider hates.

... in the sense that...

Similar service that supports more platforms at a lower price (free).

Ok, that's reasonable, but is it better on iOS? I ask out of curiosity.

You're right that I'm judging it prematurely. I haven't tried the app out yet (apparently it's not in the AppStore). But from the screenshots, and having used Instapaper - it definitely looks like a good contender.

You're judging an app based on screenshots?

Really?

Much of web would be so much more pleasant if article based sites were formatted from the get go like they are in Readability. I would gladly put up with one or two ads and they would more likely get my attention.

I wish there was a browser plugin that makes every web page appear as if run through Readability/Readable by default. Of course, it would be nice if it was really snappy, too.

would be nice if they provided readability as a library or a documented API for third-parties.

We do!

http://www.readability.com/publishers/api

We also offer a Content API for getting the content of articles. Send us an email for more info.

Is the API now free?

Yes — as always :)

it is indeed available as a library. with multiple ports, no less.

I already have and use Instapaper. What reasons are there to start using Readability instead?

Apple is already killing these 3rd party services (readability,instapaper etc ..) they have a readability button in their latest safari for ios5 alongside with a reading list. hence the decision the make it free ..

iMessage was another attempt to kill whats app, I won't be surprised if instagram is next.

Not at all.

Apple's service is useful, but it's only an aggregated list of your own links to read. Open one on iOS, and it opens the full webpage. Far from ideal.

It's excellent to see them contributing to online reading, though. The 'Reader' Safari feature is based on our code, actually! (we're in the license page).

There is no way to view your links outside of the Apple's browsers, it automatically archives links you click on even once, even if just to peak, and it's entirely locked to the Mac and iOS devices. For the target audience the feature was designed for (clearly not my mom), it falls short in many ways. I don't think anything's killing anything quite yet.

Plenty of people who don't use Safari.

Free service and free apps? Whats the business model?

I'm wondering the same thing. Their original business model of splitting revenue with the authors was interesting, but I'm guessing they didn't get many subsribers.

I was interested in supporting them, but because I already support Marco @ Instapaper with a monthly donation, the Readability subscription (was it $5 or $7 per month) wasn't worth it for myself.

It's still their business model, they've had a free version and a premium version (w/ the revenue split) for quite a while now, and it doesn't seem like this announcement changes that. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the big change is that the apps are now free too, or maybe that some premium features have become available to everyone.

Correct, that is still the business model.

You couldn't have an account at all without paying before. Now, you can sign up for an account for free. With that includes a 30-article Reading List, (optionally) public profile, and access to the apps (device syncing, &c).

Premium users also get Archives, an Unlimited Reading List (mine has 1000+ articles in it), daily Kindle digests, and —of course— the warn fuzzy feeling of supporting the writers that create the content you enjoy.

The list is likely to grow in the future.

Freemium. See the home page, where they talk about "Premium" subscribers.

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