Today we’re excited to announce the latest version of Readability for iOS. Version 1.1 may be a point release, but it packs a serious punch.

Top Reads and Longform Picks

We love finding new ways to help you discover killer content with real substance. With version 1.1, we’ve integrated two right into the app. Tap the main Reading List menu and you’ll get instant access to the new Top Reads feature, as well as featured picks from Longform.

The editorial team at Longform has already established a reputation for selecting some of the very best long form content on the Web. With this feature, we’re putting them to work for you right in the app.

And with Top Reads, we’re automatically surfacing the pieces Readability users are engaging with the most from across our entire platform. The team has done a lot of work under the hood to ensure Top Reads are pieces users are really committing to, not just whizzing by. The average time spent on a Top Reads piece is over 4 minutes, virtually unheard of in most online content circles. It’s engagement that goes beyond the pageview.

Innovative UI Tweaks

Version 1.1 for iOS introduces an elegant new pagination model: double-tap to scroll. Double-tapping within an article now scrolls it to your selection point automatically. It’s super simple and a delight to use. Also, handy time-to-read counts have been integrated throughout the app to help you select the next piece to dive into.

Performance, Performance, Performance

Version 1.1 is fast. Syncing is up to 8 times faster than before, depending on your flavor of iOS device. Our developers took advantage of the latest iOS software and hardware improvements to squeeze every drop of performance out of this release.

Getting it Right

We’re proud of the thought and care that goes into our products, and this release is no exception. A special thanks goes out to our partners at Teehan+Lax, who helped us pull together a truly rock-solid release for you. Enjoy, and if you have any thoughts or requests, please be sure to let us know!

If you’re a redditor, you probably already know about Alien Blue, a fantastic reddit client for iOS devices. It allows you to browse your favorite subreddits on your iPhone or iPad with the polish and feel you’ve come to expect from top-tier iOS apps. We love it because the focus is on the content above all, with an emphasis on good, clear design.

That’s why we’re excited to see Alien Blue’s new integration of Readability. When you tap through to an article in Alien Blue, you now have the option of seeing a cleaned up, mobilized view of the article. The result is a very pleasant reading experience that’s completely in line with Alien Blue’s intuitive, user-friendly approach.

The update is now available on iTunes. Check it out and give it a try!

When it comes to the little touches, very few iOS apps come close to Reeder. It’s one of the most polished and thoughtfully designed Google Reader, Readability and now Fever clients around. Today marks the release of a brand new, re-imagined experience of Reeder for iPhone and it’s a beauty.

Reeder has included full Readability integration for over a year now and we’re proud to be one of the flagship services of this new release. We could go on and on about all the little (and big!) touches that make this update stand out, but you really need to try it to appreciate it. Congratulations to Silvio Rizzi on what is undoubtedly one of the best news readers around.

If you haven’t tried Reeder yet, now’s a great time. It’s available on iTunes now.

Since Readability launched just over a year ago, we’ve continued to evolve. The team has built an incredible platform for reading, along with our own apps for iOS and Android. Readability has been integrated into Pulse, Reeder, Longform, and several other chart-topping apps. We’ve attracted millions of readers that are loyal to Readability and use the service every day.

And we’ve taken some chances. Run some experiments. Today, we’re announcing the end of one of those: As of June 30, 2012, Readability will no longer accept reader fees.

What We Were Trying To Accomplish

We’re passionate about building tools to help great content flourish online. That goes beyond tinkering with layouts and time-shifting text. That means figuring out alternatives to broken business models that no longer adequately support most writers and publishers.

Ad-based models continue to erode, and the online subscription programs of many commercial publishers have yet to take off. For publishing to have a healthy future, we need to find better ways of paying for the content we value. Readability’s publisher payment plan was one such attempt—the first of many, we hope.

Why It Didn’t Work

Two things needed to happen for the publisher payment plan to be a lasting success. One, a large group of readers needed to support writing through Readability. Two, a large group of publishers needed to accept that support.

The first part went well. Thousands of you agreed to spend $5 a month (and sometimes more). But the second part proved difficult. Reading behavior on the Web is incredibly fragmented. Nobody reads from just 15 or 20 sites a month. People read from hundreds of sites a month, creating a vast long tail of publishers.

And the great majority of those publishers never registered. Out of the millions—yes, millions—of domains that flowed through Readability, just over 2,000 registered to claim their money. As a result, most of the money we collected—over 90%—has gone unclaimed. As of today there’s nearly $150,000 in earmarked money sitting in a separate, untouched bank account.

What We’re Doing With the Unclaimed Money

We don’t want that money. It was meant to support writing. And the feedback we’ve gotten from our audience tells us that’s what they want it to do, too.

If you registered as a publisher with Readability, we’ll be sending you any remaining money your site has earned by July 31, 2012, regardless of amount. Just make sure your address is up to date on your publisher account page so we have a place to mail the check. (We’ll be emailing reminders to all our registered publishers, and setting aside funds so the ones we don’t have an address for can update their information and claim their money at any point in the future.)

If you haven’t already registered your domain with Readability, you have until July 15, 2012 to do so. We’d love to give that money to every domain in our logs automatically, but we need to verify site ownership to keep others from claiming your money. Readability’s publisher registration process includes some important steps that help us do that. Publishers can register here.

But what happens after that? What if we’re not able to get every dollar back into every deserving writer’s hands? We’re going to do the next best thing we can think of. All remaining money that was put aside to be claimed by domain owners will be given to non-profit organizations that speak to the spirit of supporting reading and writing. Today, we’re incredibly excited to announce our first two donation recipients:

• 826 Valencia. We’re donating $50,000 to 826 Valencia. Since we started brainstorming about which organizations to donate to, 826 Valencia popped up within minutes. It’s an amazing organization that is dedicated to supporting students ages 6–18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write. Their services are structured around the understanding that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success. Congratulations to 826 Valencia.
• Knowbility. We’re donating $50,000 to Knowbility. Ever since the Readability javascript bookmarklet was released in 2009, we’ve heard from countless readers with disabilities that Readability has made a huge difference for them. By simplifying the reading experience and bringing the main content forward, Readability has proven invaluable for people with blindness, low-vision and cognitive difficulties. Established in 1998, Knowbility’s mission speaks to those very same goals. Their aim is to raise awareness and train web professionals about why and how to make the online world fully accessible to all, including people with disabilities. Congratulations to Knowbility.

We’re thrilled to put the money from this experiment to use with these fantastic organizations, but the real gratitude should go to the subscribers who took the leap and contributed their money to the Readability vision of supporting reading and writing.

What Comes Next

We encourage everyone to read over the Policy Change FAQ and register your domains if you haven’t done so already.

I’ll also be on The Big Web Show with Jeffrey Zeldman today (June 13, 2012) at 3pm EST to talk about the policy change and answer questions. You can tune in here to listen in.

Ending the publisher payment system allows us to put our full energy behind making Readability incredible for all of our users. We’ll continue to work with publishers, just as we’ll continue to forge relationships with developers and writers and readers and everyone else that’s become a part of the Readability ecosystem. It’s been a hell of a first year. The next one will be even better.

Stay tuned.

Since the early days, we’ve been fans of the Barnes & Noble NOOK devices. From the NOOK Simple Touch eReaders to the Android-powered NOOK tablet, Barnes & Noble has delivered a great family of devices for reading.

Today, we’re excited to announce the availability of Readability for the NOOK Tablet. It’s a free app that brings you the great reading experience everyone’s come to expect from Readability.You can access your reading list and read your saved pages even when you’re offline. The app brings gorgeous typography and a wide array of styling options to bring an amazing reading experience to your NOOK Tablet.

We’re excited to have Readability available for the NOOK Tablet. It’s great to bring together a great reading app with a great reading device. If you own a NOOK Tablet, there’s no reason to wait. Grab Readability today.

As we continue to get flooded with all sorts of stuff on the web, we’ve come to value the effort people put into sifting through, collecting and grouping together links that are worthwhile. Seasoned curators like Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, Jason Kottke and the Longform site and iPad app have made discovering stuff so much easier by doing the work of finding and elevating the absolute best of the web.

Today, in collaboration with the Arc90 Lab, we’re launching a tool that will make it easier for anyone to do that work. Introducing Readlists.

What’s Readlists, you ask? Here’s the back-of-the-box description:

A Readlist is a mixtape for reading.

You take a group of links — articles, recipes, course materials, whatever — and Readlists bundles them into an e-book and send directly to your Kindle, iPad, or iPhone. Every Readlist is shareable on the web. You can even embed Readlists into your own blog or site, the same way you would a Youtube video.

With a Readability account, you can manage the Readlists that you create and keep a catalog for sharing with others. You can even share an edit URL so others can contribute to your list without any overhead.

The Readlists home page already features some great collections of articles from well-known writers like Anil Dash and Jeffrey Zeldman. We’ll be featuring various Readlists over time.

Above all else, Readlists is a tool for anyone. If you’re passionate about a particular topic or want an easier way to collect and share bundles of links, Readlists is designed to make your life easier. You’ll find an excellent primer on getting started with Readlists over on the Arc90 Lab.

Follow Readlists on Twitter to keep up on any news or updates. We hope you enjoy this powerful new tool for helping people collect and share links on the web.

Today we’re incredibly proud to be launching the next generation of our content normalization engine, codenamed Iris. It’s live right now and you’ll start to see improved results as you use Readability over the next few weeks.

For the past year, while Readability’s adoption and growth accelerated, we began thinking about how we wanted the core engine to evolve. Iris is the culmination of months of learning, re-architecting, design and development.

The foundational principle behind Iris is this: information on the web today exists in myriad contexts—and the sphere of differing contexts is growing. Iris is designed to untangle the web content you want and bring it forward.

The Context of Content

Much of the Readability engine’s success is attributed to the fact that a large portion of the reading web happens to share a common context: the article. It’s what we’ve focused on to date and we’re very proud of the work we’ve done there.

Still, today’s web includes far more than the generic article. Wikipedia is not just an article. A forum thread is not an article. A YouTube video, of course, is not an article. Not even articles themselves are all created equal.

With Iris, we’ve built an engine that you might call abstract—inspired by IBM’s Watson, the machine that beat contestants on Jeopardy!, Iris’ first order of business is to figure what type of content source is at hand. It analyzes a page, determines the likely context based on a number of factors and extracts what a human would expect as meaningful information from that source. Each context is fully malleable, and can be modified and improved upon individually.

This results in a dramatically improved user experience across the myriad apps, services and tools built on Readability. Expect better results on all sites, even non-article pages on sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, Vimeo and many more.

A Richer Readability Experience

Once the content type is determined, there’s still the complex task of knowing precisely what to tease out of a web resource. Even web articles—Readability’s wheelhouse—are comprised of much more than just a headline and body text. With Iris, Readability gains the ability to glean a whole new level of insight into what facets of a web resource matters to readers and developers: titles and headlines. Subheadlines. Lead images. Videos. Excerpts. Authors. Languages. Captions. Beyond just a great end-user experience, Iris represents a powerful bridge to the new ways content is being consumed beyond the browser.

Faster Engine, Faster Improvement

Finally, we wanted an engine that evolves and improves as quickly as the web. Rather than tethering improvements to software updates, Iris enjoys an extensible framework that allows for improvement from week to week and day to day. Users and developers will immediately benefit from updates—whether introducing support for new content types or better targeting.

As an added benefit, Iris is also significantly faster than the previous iteration, as determining a context before parsing allows us to skip a lot of unnecessary work. We’ll be able to scale the platform more effectively now, and that means a better experience for our users.

Live Now

Readers will start to see the benefits of Iris starting today. Developers will start to see the new fields (currently “dek” (subhead), leading image URL, text direction, and better content distillation including image captions) immediately and those fields will be populated over the next couple of weeks as we bring new contexts online.

We’re incredibly excited about this step in our growth as a platform. We couldn’t have made such dramatic strides without the fantastic developers and partners we’ve had long conversations with about the value and diversity of the web. We’re happy to provide all we can for the network we’ve become a part of.

With Readability’s newfound flexibility, we’re now in an even better position to work with publishers and developers to make sure their content looks absolutely impeccable within Readability. If that sounds like you, please get in touch.

Happy reading!

While we’re hacking away on some great new features for Readability, we thought now would be a great time to pause, come up for air and share what we’re about:

1. We want more people to read great stuff on the web.
2. We want to evolve the model that supports the publishers who create that great work.
3. We want the experience of reading that work to be as pleasant and rewarding as possible.
4. We believe the fundamentals of publishing, writing and reading on the web are evolving rapidly.

How we consume things is changing and the original notion of “publish and consume in the web browser” is being challenged. What is clear from everyone’s experiments, including our own, is that the current reading experience isn’t as good as both writers and readers deserve. As we build innovative tools and products here at Readability, we think carefully about the decisions we make. We’re a small, independent, bootstrapped company, but we think we can have a big impact on how everyone reads. And we know it’s an important opportunity because we’re joined by a number of innovative companies, both big and small, who are all trying different ways to make this work.

Reading a web page in your web browser is simple enough, but the other ways we can work with that story today are nearly infinite. For example:

• If you send a tweeted link from your Twitter app to your Instapaper account, it lands there without you ever viewing the original web page.
• If you open just about any link in a news reading app like Zite, you will find the content of that article without ever viewing the original web page.
• If you turn on a mobilizer view in some popular Twitter clients, you will open a mobile view of a page without ever viewing the original web page.
• …and who knows what’s possible with the right combination of IFTTT and Pinboard and many other powerful, awesome apps that share, remix, store and reformat content.

We’re fortunate that people are passionate about this stuff, passionate enough to really get their emotions going. Even people who work in the same office as our Readability team have fallen into the mistaken belief that this is somehow a team sport where we have to choose sides between different apps. So it’s no wonder that even smart, thoughtful writers can say surprisingly vitriolic things with uncharacteristic thoughtlessness when writing about an area as exciting as this one.

Paying Publishers

We are immensely proud of one key part of our experiments with Readability so far: We cut checks to writers. And we want to cut more of them. We welcome more readers to pay and more publishers to register and claim their money. We take pride in being the first reading platform to try something this radical. Is our method of paying publishers the right one? Almost certainly not yet. If you’re a publisher and are uncomfortable for any reason, contact us and we’ll fix the issue.

We’re experimenting because we do not believe that, ten years from now, advertisers will be happily paying for CPM banner ads on a site that people leave to read in some other app. And we don’t believe that publishers will support over the long term paid apps which generate no revenue for the publisher. The model we’re experimenting with definitely has its challenges, and we’re going to be careful about how we handle change because we made a public promise by way of our model.

Above all else, we take great pride in what we are about. Many publishers have approached us with both words of encouragement and opportunities to work together. Countless developers have built a thriving ecosystem around the platform. These bridges have been built because we’ve gone about this endeavor with purpose, integrity and a profound belief in the words great writers write and the meaning that readers find in them.

We’ve got more great things to come as we look ahead. And by “we” we mean our partners and the amazing community that has embraced Readability. Stay tuned.