I’m not one to keep up with all the new techno marvels that stream from all corners of the world day in and day out. I almost never check out the large pile of posts that get put up on this blog, even if it is one of my Google Reader subscriptions. Most of this gadgets, programs, apps, websites, social networking sites and what-have-you seem to just suck up our limited time and give little in return. That said, every now and then I get something that makes my life better. Other than he new Pleco Chinese dictionary for the iPhone/iPod Touch I have recently been playing with a new web service called Readability.
Like much of my generation I do most of my reading on computers. Now with a full-time office job, which affords ample time for reading the news and what not, I am doing more reading than ever before. The problem is the internet and a computer screen are not nice places to rest your eyes hours at a time. The flashing ads, teeny tiny text, distracting links that take you away from what you wanted to read in the first place, and so on make reading annoying in a way curling up with a paperback isn’t. Besides having Google Reader to organize and display the countless blogs I try to keep up with, I’ve begun to use this nifty new service called Readability.
Readability is basically a link on your browser that you click when you want to view a online text without all the clutter. For example, today I was reading Evan Osnos’ interview with the U.S. Ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman. On the New Yorker website the article looks like this:
It’s not horribly displayed, nor is it egregiously distracting, but nonetheless I would rather read it in a font size and layout to my particular liking. So while viewing the page I just clicked on the Readability icon on my bookmarks bar and I see the article rendered like this:
Goodbye crap, hello clean clear text. The readability site lets you pick what style, text size, and margin you want when you make the bookmark on their website (it’s very easy). The three buttons in the top left corner let you return to the original version, print the unadulterated text, or email the text to a friend. This isn’t really the best example because Evan Osnos’ New Yorker blog on China, Letter From China, can be easily viewed on any blog aggregator, such as Google Reader.
The real beauty of this service for me has been with viewing Chinese articles. Not only are Chinese websites well known for their bad design, distracting ads, and generally off-putting vibe (though the situation does seem to be getting better as of late), but Chinese text is very difficult to read if it is small, which makes Readability great for reading Chinese texts online. Importantly, viewing a text with Readability doesn’t hamper one’s ability to cut and paste or use tools like Perakun to look up characters. Here’s an example from a People’s Daily article published today on the Chinese government’s anti-corruption work:
Nice, right?
My father is a true believer in having the best reading sitaution possible when you sit down to read something. Having proper lighting, folding the newspaper the right way, and, when reading something from the internet, always printing out a text before reading it. Now if we all printed out everything we read online there would be no more trees on this planet, so for me (and maybe my dad) Readability is a useful and almost perfect tool.
