Distraction-free reading on the Web

This is a long-ish post because I have included examples to motivate and illustrate these tools. If you just want just the punchline, skip to the end.


Here's what a first page of a typical online news article looks like nowdays:



Here is each page with the story's content marked with a red rectangle:




What you do not see in these snapshots is that each webpage has at least one advertisement with motion in it, making each page even busier and more distracting when looking at it "live". If you would like a less distracting experience when you read content online, here is what you could have
at a click of a button in your browser and a wait of one or two seconds:




As you can see, the ads are gone. Unfortunately, the tools for accomplishing this "scrubbing" are not perfect, and sometimes (as in the middle snapshot), the image you do want to see may be scrubbed away with the ads. The scrubbing above was done using Evernote Clearly tool. Here are the results of another such tool, Readability:




Readability did fine with the middle page, but took away the video in the first page.


Other than the issue with occasional over-zealousness of these tools on images and video, they are truly great and have other nifty features. With both tools, you can

• increase or decrease the size of the text
• send the clean article to a printer (a real one, or a PDF file if you have PDF printing installed)
• save the article for later reading

Readability lets you link an Amazon account so that you can send the clean article to your Kindle (device or app). Evernote Clearly let's you clip the clean article to your Evernote account.

The punchline:
Both tools are free. The free version of Evernote Clearly has a limit on the number of articles you can clip to your Evernote account. You can install both tools in the same browser -- when an article doesn't work well with one tool, you can try the other. I use Evernote Clearly as my main tool, and Readability as my backup.


Installing them is very easy. For Evernote Clearly, go to evernote.com/clearly and click the "Get Clearly for ..." button. For Readability, go to readability.com and click the "Download" button. When you click either of these, you will almost certainly get a security warning, either as a pop-up, or in a bar at the bottom or at the top of the page. I'm confident of these two tools and feel comfortable ignoring the warning. Follow the one or two steps as directed, and enjoy a more pleasant Web reading experience!

For more information, see these posts: lifehacker.com, gigaom.com, dashes.com.