On Reading Later

This morning, Readability announced a new service that lets users’ fees go to the content-providers they like.

Marco’s excellent Instapaper service will support Readability, allowing users Instapaper’d items to count as Readability items. This will let content providers see traffic and income, regardless of which service their readers use.

I — like almost every web writer I know — have setup my site to work with Readability’s new feature, hopefully creating a little income. I have “Send to Instapaper” links ready to go, but I am not going to implement them on ForkBombr quite yet. I think that the reader should decide what service — if any — they want to use.

At first, I’m sure I won’t recover my $5/month, but once Instapaper logs can get sent to Readability, I’m hoping to make enough for a cup of coffee every so often. Maybe I can even score coffee with a doughnut during good months.

At the end of the day, it is cool to see two competing services work together for the good of content producers. It’s good for everyone. As a consumer, its good, too. I currently use Instapaper, but since I just handed Readability $5, I’m going to use their service this month, just to see what its like. So far, I’m impressed.¹

At the very least, I can help support sites I love until Instapaper is integrated into the system.