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➶ Flow Interactive on Safari 5 Reader
A great short post, with an excellent illustration of why Safari Reader is currently necessary. A choice quote:
The mere existence of this feature is a sign that the reading experience on the web is often not satisfactory. By failing to recognise the main need of the reading user or by letting other considerations trample this need, publishers shoot themselves in the foot and are driving their users to bypass their primary income source.
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➶ Why We Built Readability
The folks from Arc90, creators of the Readability bookmarklet that forms the basis of Safari’s Reader feature, offer some great feedback about their reasoning behind the bookmarklet.
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➶ Stop Hacking Safari Reader
Great post from Faruk Ateş. Beyond the Safari Reader customisation points, it’s a great reminder that instead of bitching on Twitter, there are legitimate means to file your bugs. With Apple, that starts with going to bugreporter.apple.com and signing in with your Apple ID.
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Safari 5 Reader Hysteria: The Aftermath
In the last 20 hours, a tonne of folks have visited to read my piece on the Safari 5 Reader Hysteria. There’s been a fair number of comments and accompanying posts, so I figured it was worth adding some more points I didn’t address - my Tumblr Questions form seems to be serving as a handy feedback form, so if you’ve any thoughts throw them in there.
One reader mentioned the fact that Safari Reader’s pagination loads in the following pages content, thus effectively giving publishers the impressions. The only oversight here is that, of course, advertisers are possibly paying for impressions in the expectation that they’ll be meaningful ones, in front of actual readers - and I can see how that annoys advertising-driven types, though not sympathise with their cause.
In this day and age, I have to question just how many organisations can justify the artificial pagination in their pieces. Large online pieces pieces are rare in the mainstream online community (citation needed).
Then there’s folks who are actively looking (if only as an academic exercise) into ways of disabling folks ability to use Reader on their sites. Should people outside the developer community follow this lead, and start blocking Reader (a tool that encourages the consumption of their content) then people will start to vote with their feet and go elsewhere for their content.
Whilst Safari’s market share is relatively low, what’s the betting that Mozilla, Microsoft and Google are all watching curiously to see how this works? Google’s a particularly interesting case here: their interests are in both competing with Safari in Chrome, but also serving up ads online; it only takes Mozilla offering a similar feature in Firefox to cause consternation amongst online publishers and a rethinking of their online reading experiences.
To close, I’ve got two links. Firstly Lukas Mathis’s spot-on followup:
The one thing you can immediately influence is whether your users are able to easily read your articles. If they are not, then perhaps Safari Reader is not the problem, but merely a symptom of your actual problem.
If people don’t feel the need to use Safari Reader anymore, everybody wins. Don’t fight Safari Reader. Instead, make it obsolete.
And finally Tom Morris’ slightly more humorous (not-entirely-safe-for-work) retort:
All these wonderful things [comments, share buttons, and adverts] are gone now. Gone due to Steve Jobs and his insistence on good user experience. Bastard.
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On this Safari 5 Reader Hysteria
There’s a tonne of posts today about the slick new Safari Reader feature I linked to yesterday. As someone who enjoys reading decent content online, I totally welcome it. I’ve used readability / Instapaper bookmarklets for some time - both on my Mac and iPhone - and, if I’m honest, I’m surprised at the reaction from outlets that call out Safari 5’s Reader feature. If you believe some quarters of the press, the Reader functionality is an affront to online advertising revenues - choking outlets of their deserved revenue and attempts at profit. There’s also clearly some folks who haven’t actually tried Reader.
Let’s get one thing straight: Safari 5’s Reader feature is not an ad-blocker. It’s no more prominent or enforced than clicking the RSS button in Safari’s address field. If you visit a page with a element of over 2,000 characters (I believe) Reader is made available for use - note that it’s not enabled automatically, much as some would love it.
Fraser Speirs makes an excellent point:
Most interesting thing about Safari Reader? It shows how little actual content there is on these busy, long webpages.
Ken Fisher, at the usually-sane Ars Technica calls Apple hypocritical:
So the company that has made an advertising platform a major part of its iOS strategy is also hawking an ad-blocking technology for its Web browser, where it has no stake in ads. App Store: use our unblockable ads, developers! They help you get paid for your hard work! Web: hey, block some ads, readers! They’re annoying!
Gizmodo links to Jim Lynch
Apple has essentially destroyed the web publishing model completely with the release of Safari 5. This is the equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on the entire web economy. It’s a weapon of potential mass destruction for web publishers. Publishers now have absolutely no control over how their content is displayed in a browser and if the content can even be monetized in a significant way or not.
Hyperbole much?
You can almost imagine what started off Safari Reader: Steve visiting insert big name news site with ads and being massively unhappy with the reading experience. Here’s just one example. From Jim Lynch’s site.
Yes, Safari does some smart stuff behind the scenes - on Lynch’s blog, his multi-page diatribe is brought into one paginated lightbox - and that eliminates ad impressions. But if Safari Reader eliminates the bullshit practice of publishers including disproportionately highly numbers of pages per article then you won’t hear any complaints from me. My own primary interest in reading online surprisingly goes beyond a headline. I take the time to read an article, and if Safari Reader makes reading much easier, then it’s the site’s fault for failing to make itself reasonably legible.
Thankfully, in amongst a swathe of misjudged writing on Safari Reader, The Guardian has a level-headed piece on the feature:
Technologies like Safari Reader sound a salutary warning to media companies and advertisers. From now on, we must love our readers or die.
Amen to that. If anything, instead of this belligerent whinging, web publishers should wise up that people visit their sites to read content. Safari Reader does hide ads, after they - along with the almost-constant barrage of ‘Share This’, ‘Tweet This’, ‘Buzz This’ bullshit - are shown alongside each post, and above all: it’s not mandatory to use, or enforced any more than the RSS button. Perhaps instead of flamebait posts of ‘Apple are out to get us’ media companies should be asking themselves ‘how did reading content online become so sucky’?
Update, 10th June: I’ve had a tonne of feedback on this post, and published a quick followup including some of it. Thanks to everyone who sent in feedback.
© Nik Fletcher 2007-2011 ~ Contact
