03. April 2012 · Categories: Copyright

There are two points of criticism with Readabilty:

  • First that they link to their own reformatted copies of content. This is bad, and in violation of copyright law. But they seem to come around and change this.
  • Secondly that they promise to pay 70% to the content creators. They do not keep this promise, because they keep the money if not claimed by publications within a year. They should then distribute this old money among those publications that have actually registered.

But these can easily be solved. And we will see from their reaction how serious they are and if these shady sounding practices were a mistake.

The true problem however lies with the publishers. It is their decision to provide layouts that are not well suited to reading, in the name of serving the advertising gods. But honestly advertising needs to remain rare enough that it will not become clutter and so profoundly ignored, and it really was this advertising overload that gave rise to Readabilty, Instapaper and other reading tools. Without dynamic pages caused by advertising we could even actually use our browser to do proper offline reading.