ReadWriteWeb

While reading is one of the main activities on the Internet, a lot of sites pay very little attention to the readability of their text. Instead, the reader's eye is constantly drawn to other UI elements, ads, and widgets. Arc90's Readability experiment is setting out to change this. Readability is a small bookmarklet that extracts the text from almost any web site and displays it on an easy to read page that removes all of the clutter that can make reading on the Internet so hard sometimes.

We can no longer call Feedly just "an alternative interface for Google Reader" as we once did. Since the launch of Feedly Mini, a new mini bar that hovers at the bottom of the screen as you surf through blogs on the web, the service has become more of blog reading companion than anything else. Today that bar, also known as Feedly Mini, has been updated to better integrate both Twitter and FriendFeed with your blog reading. The experience is incredible and makes Feedly a must-have tool for anyone who uses these services.

Feeling information overloaded? No doubt one of the sources of stress in your life are the unread items that await you daily in your RSS reader. No matter how many times you read through your feeds, new items always appear. Perhaps it's time to find a different way to get your news. An experimental Firefox add-on called Ambient News may be able to help.

Project Gutenberg, the longtime home of free eBooks on the web, has just introduced a mobile-ready version of their hosted content. Called PG Mobile, or Project Gutenberg's Mobile Edition, the software transforms the plain text of the files on the Project Gutenberg web site into a format that can be read easily on mobile devices with small screens.

Popular Firefox addon Read It Later has just introduced an updated version of their plugin which adds new functionality to Google Reader. With the new extension, which now works in both Firefox and IE, you can now get through your RSS feeds faster by checking off the items you want to read later in more detail. You can then access those saved items from any web browser, whether it's Firefox at home, IE at work, or even your iPhone.

We all know what it looks like when a novel is adapted for film or television. But what would it look like when the novel format is adapted for the Internet? We reported in March that more and more reading is being done online, especially by the younger generation, but because of the distractions of the media rich world in which we live, most reading on the web is actually just skimming. So how do you create a compelling novel format for the online world? Canadian author Nicola Furlong thinks the answer is a new web publishing format she's calling a "Quillr."

Earlier this this year, we commented on the infamous Steve Jobs quote "...the fact is people don't read anymore," arguing that, people do read, they just prefer to do it online. However, in this transition from page to screen, a question has risen: are people really reading online content or just scanning page? Apparently, it's the latter.

Sarah Perez wrote today: "When Amazon introduced their e-book reader, the Kindle, Steve Jobs made a strong proclamation regarding the book industry that received a lot of attention: "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore [...]" As it turns out, he was only half-right. People read, even those in the younger generation, they just prefer to do it online." Backing that sentiment up was a comment by Sean Mulholland, who said that he's a good example of a digital native: "I hardly ever read books. Probably only about one or two a year, and even then they're typically non-fiction as opposed to 'literature'."

When Amazon introduced their e-book reader, the Kindle, Steve Jobs made a strong proclamation regarding the book industry that received a lot of attention: "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore... The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore." As it turns out, he was only half-right. People read, even those in the younger generation, they just prefer to do it online.