Instapaper and Readability

Jon Mitchell, writing for ReadWriteWeb:

Readability wants publishers to like this arrangement. It wants them to let Readability subscribers provide a new revenue stream to make up for the lost ad impressions. In exchange, Readability and its users will control the reading experience and the value of the content. All articles will look the same for the reader.
Publishers shouldn't settle for that. Even if Readability's experiment works and makes publishers a few bucks, it's not a future of its own. Sites that want to matter (and profit) in the read-later age have to provide value that goes beyond articles that can be scraped and saved.

Mitchell is right, even though I still use Readability. They're not a bad service, you know. In fact, they've always been more appealing to me than Instapaper since I'm one who really likes beautiful user interfaces. But sadly, in the end this kind of comes down to who you want to support, just like stuff offline -- I speak of whether to support the local economy or a large corporation, which I'll write about later on. I don't think Readability's idea is bad, but it definitely isn't something publications should have to accept and that's the problem here.