Reading Apps: Readability. Instapaper. ReadItLater. Evernote.

Read­abil­i­ty is a handy tool that takes an arti­cle or web post, cleans it up, as the name implies to improve its read­abil­i­ty, and dis­plays it for you in your brows­er. They also gath­er up arti­cles post­ed this way for you to read lat­er, or to send to your Kin­dle. Aside from one-by-one view­ing of a cleaned up arti­cle, the ser­vice has required a $5 month­ly fee. In the process, Read­abil­i­ty shares rev­enue with the con­tent-pro­vid­ing pub­lish­er.

There are sim­i­lar ser­vices, notably Instapa­per and Rea­d­It­Later. Back in May, I wrote a blog entry com­par­ing these two. I have still be pass­ing back and forth between these two, lik­ing Instapa­per’s inte­gra­tion with Read­abil­i­ty, and lik­ing Rea­d­It­Later for the clean­li­ness and usabil­i­ty of its web­site.

Both Instapa­per and Rea­d­It­Later have mobile apps. Both were inte­grat­ed with the incred­i­bly pop­u­lar iPad app Flip­board. One dif­fer­en­tia­tor for Instapa­per was a close inte­gra­tion with Read­abil­i­ty.

On Novem­ber 16th, Read­abil­i­ty announced a free option, as well as the impend­ing release of apps for the iOS plat­forms (iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch). Here is a sum­ma­ry of the new Read­abil­i­ty freemi­um pric­ing mod­el, with $5 a month get­ting the pre­mi­um plan:

 

Free users are lim­it­ed to 30 Read­ing List arti­cles and 30 Favorite arti­cles; Pre­mi­um users have no lim­its, and also can Archive arti­cles, receive an auto­mat­ed dai­ly digest to their Kin­dle (over wi-fi, and thus with­out addi­tion­al costs from Ama­zon), and up to 70% of their month­ly fee goes to authors and pub­lish­ers.

The announce­ment led to a fair­ly pub­lic dis­cus­sion between Instapa­per founder Mar­co Arment (The rela­tion­ship between Read­abil­i­ty and Instapa­per) and Read­abil­i­ty found­ing part­ner Richard Ziade (Read­abil­i­ty & Instapa­per).

The space has got­ten quite crowd­ed, in fact, since Apple added a sim­i­lar “Read­ing List” fea­ture to its Safari brows­er. And the day after Read­abil­i­ty announced its new pric­ing mod­el and forth­com­ing iOS apps, Ever­note launched a sim­i­lar ser­vice, Clear­ly, as a Google Chrome app.

For me, Rea­d­It­Later has been the main appli­ca­tion I have used for this pur­pose, because of the crisp, clean, and I would even say, beau­ti­ful design of their web site and apps. While I use Ever­note almost obses­sive­ly, its ten­den­cy to grab every­thing, or inex­plic­a­ble web page ele­ments, has made it a frus­trat­ing expe­ri­ence.

Using Rea­d­It­Later, I have missed the Read­abil­i­ty inte­gra­tion. Even with Rea­d­It­Later, I felt that Read­abil­i­ty had a bet­ter inter­face.

With Read­abil­i­ty going to the freemi­um mod­el, I expect to use that more, and move away from Instapa­per entire­ly. I will then be com­par­ing Rea­d­It­Later with Read­abil­i­ty once the Read­abil­i­ty iOS apps are released, and with Ever­note Clear­ly in Google Chrome. Those promise to have a high design aspect, with high-qual­i­ty fonts. And of course, while I steered clear of Read­abil­i­ty when it only had a paid mod­el, freemi­um (as Ever­note can attest) has a qual­i­ty of draw­ing peo­ple in to get them hooked.

My sum­ma­ry of the score­board at this point is:

• Rea­d­It­Later — First to mar­ket, in 2007, with a great user inter­face design sense.Still a major play­er.
• Instapa­per — Sec­ond to mar­ket, in 2008. Clean, but not styl­ish. A lit­tle nerdy as far as the design goes. Pos­si­bly suf­fer­ing from a mor­tal blow from the one-two punch from Read­abil­i­ty and Ever­note this week.
• Read­abil­i­ty — Has the most beau­ti­ful design of the bunch. Set itself apart as with the com­bi­na­tion of gor­geous design and a paid mod­el, pro­vid­ing a com­pen­sa­tion mod­el for authors and pub­lish­ers to off­set what might be lost adver­tis­ing rev­enue.
• Ever­note — Promis­es much need­ed clean­er imports of arti­cles into its wide­ly pop­u­lar “mem­o­ry” ser­vice.
• Apple Safari — Handy, if you hap­pen to be in Safari on the OS X Lion or iOS 5, but I don’t think any­thing but diehards Apple fan­boys will use this as much as any of the oth­ers on the list get used.

[Updat­ed on 13 Decem­ber 2011 to cor­rect some inac­cu­ra­cies.]