Readability

 

“Simplicity is the best policy”. I had read it as a kid. Little did I know what does it exactly mean. As I grew up, I still didn’t appreciate this. However esp. in the last few years when technology has infested our lives, I am beginning to realize how cluttered and complicated everything is.

  • My average reading span for an article on the web had reduced to a few seconds. I had trouble reading beyond the article headline.
  • 3 years ago, I could watch a complete video on TED (which was usually less than 20 minutes. No more. I hardly have the patience to watch them now.
  • I often lost context due to the web sites trying to squeeze everything in the world on their pages.

Enters the Kindle which I won’t write about (for various reasons).

Enters Readability. It is a simple service which allows you to mark articles to be read later. Nothing great so far. But that is not just what it does. It has a cool reading mode, which just makes reading fun. Just install this extremely recommended Chrome readability extension and transform your reading experience on the web for ever. It not only simplifies everything, but also allows you with options to control the font sizes, width etc.

And there is more to it. It allows you to push those articles to Kindle so that you can read them at leisure. I just can’t explain what good this does to my reading experience. Even if Readability starts charging for this service, I would be happy to pay.

There are other services like Instapaper ,which is good as well. I prefer Readability over Instapaper simply because the former can handle images when converting the article for Kindle.

Don’t ask me about the digest feature not being there in Readability (for free). Read article by article. And delete article by article. We are talking about simplifying things. Digests do not really help.

Very few things in the world simplifies life, and Readability (and Kindle of course 😉 ) does.

 

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Amit Srivastava
 

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