Every single major publisher on earth has readers who find that content more engaging when delivered through our platform. And we’re the first service in history to be able to deliver that content consistently across a vast array of apps on nearly every device in use today.

From the outset, we wanted to put energy towards finding patterns and trends in all that activity that would be truly valuable to everyone. We didn’t want just another “trending” list. We knew that the reading view represented a greater commitment to shut the world out and focus on reading something—an incredible valuable behavior to pay attention to.

Today, we’re introducing a new, more sophisticated version of Top Reads. We’ve completely redesigned the experience and made the intelligence behind it even more compelling. It’s an incredibly powerful way to discover great content that’s worth your time. Just visit topreads.com to get a birds-eye view of what people are reading on the web.

If you’re not a fan of constantly visiting the same web page, just follow @topreads on Twitter. It’ll tweet out articles as soon as they heat up on the Readability service. iOS users can access Top Reads at any time right inside the Readability iOS app.

In the near future, we’ve got big plans to mine even more gold from all the amazing activity happening on Readability every minute of every day. We’re the only reading platform and network that has that insight— and we look forward to sharing more of it.

Happy reading!

The New Chrome Extension

With this version, our highest priority was to make drastic improvements to the existing features. Read Now, Read Later, and Send to Kindle have all been reworked to be faster, more responsive, and more dependable. Our second priority was to introduce a select number of new features to make reading with Readability even easier.

Tagging

We’ve made it easier than ever to keep your Reading List organized. Each time you bookmark an article for Reading Later you will have the option to add tags.

Context Menu Items

Want to quickly bookmark a handful of articles for Reading Later? Now you can just right-click on any link and select Read Later. You can also Send a page or a link to your Kindle, Read Now in a New Tab or Window, or quickly jump to your Reading List from the context menu.

Authentication

You can now log into your Readability account directly from the extension. No more being taken to a new page to log in if you Read Later on an article and are not logged in; the extension will bring the login form to you. Even better, the extension will remember what you were doing and complete that action once you’ve logged in.

Improved Speed

This thing is fast. Really fast. We’ve built a robust, dedicated server-side component whose #1 priority is to handle requests from the extension and to do so without you noticing.

Messaging

When you click a button or press a key, you expect something to happen. We’ve re-imagined how the extension communicates with you to make it crystal clear what’s happening each step of the way. In the event that something goes wrong, the extension will make you aware of the issue and give you options for what you can do.

Customization

In previous versions of the extension you’ve had the option to set custom keyboard shortcuts. We’ve kept that in place and we now offer a couple of other customizations. You can now choose between two different icons styles; red or grey and if you don’t plan on adding tags, you can turn off the tag prompt after a Read Later. We’ve also made the options easier to find; just click the gear icon at the bottom of the extension.

Head over to the Chrome Web Store to install The New Readability for Chrome, you’re going to love it.

A note to our Firefox, Safari, and Opera users: We haven’t forgotten about you! We’ll be bringing all of these new features and improvements to you soon.

Tags and Improved Sharing in Readability 1.2.5 for iOS

The newest release of our award-winning app puts a handful of oft-requested features and improvements into your hands making it an ever-more indispensable tool for reading the web in comfort.

Tags

We’ve brought the organizational power of tags to the App. Tags that you’ve added to articles on the web site or through the new Chrome Extension will now be available for you to filter your Reading List.

Native Twitter and Facebook sharing

We’ve made sharing what you’re reading easier than ever. Readability will now recognize and use any Twitter or Facebook accounts that are stored in your device settings.

More fixes and improvements

Along with exciting new features, we’ve also made a number of bug fixes and improvements. Including; full Accessibility and VoiceOver support and fixes to article syncing.

Readability 1.2.5 for iOS is available in the App Store.

These releases are another example of the high quality work that we’ll continue to provide, making reading on the web an easier and more enjoyable experience.

Thanks for reading

Today, we’re excited to unveil an updated simple one-click step for developers and partners to get rolling with any one of our three APIs: the basic feature set, the content parser or the rdd.me URL shortener (note the rdd.me API requires no key). When you visit the Readability APIs home page, you’ll be greeted with the proverbial first step: get your API keys!

After registering (or logging in if you’re an existing user) you’ll be handed your own unique API keys to get started.

If you’re an existing Readability user, just visit your My Account page and navigate to the API tab. From there, you’re asked to fill out a brief form and voilà:

To date, we’ve granted over 2,000 keys and watched an amazing ecosystem develop around Readability. Now that we’ve made it so much easier for developers to get started, we can’t wait to see what you come up with next.

Registered users of Readability can link their account to Facebook by visiting their Connections page. Down the road, we plan to continue to enhance the social experience of reading on Readability. We’re committed to not only delivering the best reading experience around but the best social experience around what you’re reading. Stay tuned!

After experimenting and developing new techniques for better brewing, enthusiasts share their findings online. There’s a lot of great information out there, but it’s all over the place. A Readlists user, eimer, decided to pull some of the best articles he found together to make his own Intro to AeroPress instruction manual.

With the holiday season well on its way, there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself stuck reading incomplete or unsatisfactory instructions. With a little research, and the help of Readlists, you can do better. And since you can send your improved instruction manual to your iPhone, iPad, Kindle, or other compatible device with the click of a button, you’ll never have to worry about losing it in a drawer somewhere.

Here’s How You Can Start Collaborating

Collaborating on a readlist is dead simple. Readlists provides two URLs on every list. One is a direct link you can email and share however you like. The other is a “public edit link”. That’s where the magic happens.

When you click the public edit link, a little window with a special link will appear. Share that link, and you’re giving anyone who clicks it the ability to edit and build onto your readlist. (Remember that anyone who has that link can edit your readlist any way they want.)

Sharing a Public edit link is a great way to work with others, and we’re thrilled to see all the inventive lists our users have been building and sharing. Sign in with your Readability account and get started collaborating on your own readlists today.

Readability has grown into a reading platform in the truest sense. Beyond our our own site and apps for iOS and Android, the lion’s share of our traffic comes from great third-party apps like Pulse, Reeder, Tweetbot, Longform, and many, many others. Continuing to grow one of the best reading APIs on the market is at the heart of what we do, and we can’t wait to see what you’ll build with it.

Here are the most popular articles on Readability right now:

• New York Magazine explores the changes that pot growers face now that it’s become more legitimized in “The Truce On Drugs.”
• In “The Saddest and Most Expensive 26 Seconds of Amateur Film Ever Made“, Vice’s Motherboard provides context for the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination—and the man behind the lens.
• In 2002, the New Yorker published “The Riddler“, a profile of Henry Hook, the misanthropic puzzle genius.
• The Bronx Banter brings us “The Killing of Gus Hasford“, a story that originally appeared in LA Weekly in 1993.
• SemiAccurate thinks Microsoft is in deep trouble. Read why in “Microsoft has failed.”
• In “Revenge of the Reality-Based Community“, from the American Conservative, one conservative gets real after facing defeat in the recent election.
• The New Yorker focuses on crowd safety and past tragedies in “Crush Point.”
• “Re-Awakenings“, from The Last Word On Nothing, tells the story of a woman with a condition that made her crave sleep.
• In the “The Thing with Feathers“, Outside follows the chase for a rare and elusive bird that was spotted in Arkansas.
  
• “‘I Pretty Much Wanted to Die’“, on Grantland, gives us a glimpse at the origin of television’s Lost.
• Wired dives into the mysteries surrounding a coded manuscript in “They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside.”
• Vanity Fair gives us some background on the French Foreign Legion in “The Expendables.”
• “The Tragedy of Britney Spears” was a Rolling Stone cover story in 2008, a troubled time for the pop sensation, and it’s resurfaced on our list this week.
• The Stranger‘s “The Lying Disease” shines a light on manifestions of Münchausen syndrome that played out online.
• Wired also gives us the goods on Google’s massive database in “Exclusive: Inside Google Spanner, the Largest Single Database on Earth.”
• And Playboy interviews with George Carlin, Steve Jobs, Frank Sinatra, and Siskel & Ebert all made the list this week as well.

Plenty of these articles were featured on Longform—a consistently great source of high quality, long form articles. If you happen to exhaust everything on Top Reads (hard to imagine), check out Longform Picks in our iOS apps. Happy reading!

The Columbia Journalism Review covers journalism, the media, and the stories behind the news with great skill and experience. For their Swing States Project, they hired reporters to monitor local political coverage in battleground states during the 2012 US elections. With the election finally over, they’ve packaged up the best of the Darts & Laurels coverage that resulted into a handy readlist.

On their quest to help local press counteract misinformation and the impact of dark money in the election, CJR‘s reporters read and analysed a lot of articles, running the gamut from lackluster to laudable. The articles on either side of the spectrum were singled out as darts and laurels, respectively.

“Taken individually, each dart or laurel clarifies a critical issue that appeared on the campaign trail, and reviews one or two efforts to cover it. But together, they provide a more comprehensive look at the performance of the campaign press through the elections,” said CJR’s Communications Manager, Brendan Fitzgerald, when we caught up with him earlier this week. Compiling them together into a readlist created a free, downloadable anthology readers can export directly to their favorite reading devices.

We recommend you check it out—it’s a fascinating read. And if you’re still pining for more political reads after that, enjoy this readlist by Manik Rathee, a front-end developer who worked on the Obama campaign, about the role of technology in the President’s recent reelection bid.