
The Readability bookmarking service will shut down on September 30, 2016 - ashleyblackmore
https://medium.com/@readability/1641cc18e02b#.usur1230j
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bouncingsoul
I will miss this one. Used it for at least 4 years.

Other than wanting a highlighting feature, I've been completely satisfied with
this abandoned product (last update at least 2 years ago?). They nailed it for
me, especially with design aesthetics.

And it had the absolute best send-to-Kindle parser: It sent an actual personal
document, not a Kindle magazine, and they even managed to include article
images most of the time (which other services struggle with).

:'(

~~~
Slackwise
> They nailed it for me, especially with design aesthetics.

#1 reason I stopped using Readability was their "designs".

The web app had constant bugs, especially right after their big redesign and
the Android mobile version was terrible. It would pop up a notification every
5 minutes to tell you it's checking for articles, and there was no way to turn
that off.

Didn't change for a year, so I dumped them and said "guess this is an
abandoned product".

~~~
dredmorbius
The Android app has been similarly insanely buggy, and seems to want to
completely re-download the article database every few uses. That was actually
a big part of what pushed me to Pocket.

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mmmcookies
I worked on Readability for its launch. I remember they had difficulty
monetising it. But more importantly, the firm that built it, Arc90 (now
Postlight), was acquired by SFX a few years ago who has no interest in that
space. I'm surprised it has stayed up this long.

~~~
dredmorbius
I suspect it coasted purely on momentum -- hosting fees or such.

The parser/converter has actually stood up amazingly well considering it's
seen little or no updating.

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dredmorbius
Sad, but hardly surprising. I would really like to hear the backstory on this.

I'd run across Readability a few years ago and found it useful. There was an
update to the application about 2012/2013, which as is typical, offered a few
things, but also took away others which had been useful.

And then .... nothing. The Facebook page hasn't been updated since Januarey
23, 2014. The blog is ... offline. Twitter actually seems active, though I'd
thought that hadn't been active either.

I really liked the concept, had issues with the execution, loved the
bookmarklet (for rendering pages within a browser in "readability view"). But
this had obviously been abandoned for a long, long time.

I've been slowly schlepping articles to Pocket. I guess I'll have to speed
that up....

Hrm. I find this about the design firm behind Readability joining Facebook, a
year ago: [http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/01/16/design-partners-
behind-m...](http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/01/16/design-partners-behind-
medium-readability-shuts-firm-join-facebook/)

~~~
nicky0
When readability started it had an innovative business model: collect monthly
from each user, and share out 70% to the owners of the pages viewed.

However, a number of bloggers and content owners objected to this, and made
bug fuss about it, and pretty much poisoned the "with it" tech croud on the
idea of Readability.

Readability then pivoted to a more conventional read-later app and read-now
service. But it never seemed to recover from its original bad press.

~~~
dredmorbius
I vaguely recall that. Pity, all 'round.

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welanes
I'm working on a bookmarking service right now (literally, open in the other
window).

Instant search, highlighting, a UI that encourages 'rediscovery' of articles
that are saved but not read ("hey you, here's what you bookmarked 7 days ago")
and a reading feature similar to readability. There's space here to build a
product that people love and that sticks around.

Parsing web pages is proving tricky in some cases, if anybody has any library
suggestions, shout.

~~~
tachaeon
will it be self hostable?

~~~
welanes
Launching as a service to begin with, however considering people's justified
concerns with bookmark services folding I'll look at that.

Key feature will be easy import from every other popular bookmark service.
Pull in your data in seconds, see if you like how we treat it, and make a call
on switching.

~~~
jm3
would love to try it. what's it called?

~~~
welanes
Unnamed as of yet but I'll send the link your way once live. A week or so.

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mehdix
Will they just trash their code? It is hardly going to be an asset for them
and probably is unmaintained for the last couple of years.

It would be great to see them opening the code to the community.

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dredmorbius
As I mentioned earlier, I'm using Pocket
([https://getpocket.com](https://getpocket.com)), which has worked out pretty
well.

Pocket _do not_ have a Readability import tool, but there's a third-party tool
their support desk just provided a URL for, caveat emptor, etc., etc.

[http://hsablonniere.github.io/readability2pocket/](http://hsablonniere.github.io/readability2pocket/)

Among other alternatives, I'll suggest giving
[https://pinboard.in](https://pinboard.in) from @idlewords (Maciej Czeglowski)
a look as well. I actually think that might have a few other features I'd
want, but am parking for now at Pocket (inertia, too many damned articles, the
simplified reader view is really appreciated).

________________________________

 _Edit:_ Corrected "in" for "io" as Pinboard's TLD.

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davidp670
If you're looking for a bookmarking alternative BookmarkOS has been awesome so
far ([https://bookmarkos.com](https://bookmarkos.com)). Also, Instapaper
([https://www.instapaper.com/](https://www.instapaper.com/)) recently got
acquired by pinterest, so it looks like it has a future.

~~~
sandstrom
Being acqui-hired doesn't spell well for its future.

------
StanAngeloff
This was the main service I've used for the past 2+ years to deliver
individual articles to my Kindle. It worked great and I would've paid good
money to keep it. Instapaper has a similar feature, however it was never quite
as good as Readability's.

What are you using to send & read web articles on your Kindle?

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avindroth
For just the readability aspect, Stylish is an excellent alternative (with
custom CSS).

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmke...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe?hl=en)

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o_____________o
Advice as a URL: [https://getpocket.com/](https://getpocket.com/)

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schmeddie
Figured this was coming after Readlists closed down a few months ago. Damn I
miss them.

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billconan
how sad, I loved readability. I tried to port their javascript code to c++.

