Safari 5′s reader is going to piss a lot of people off

Dan Moren in Macworld:

The new Safari Reader feature seems akin to Web-based services like Readability, giving you the option of viewing a Web page in a slimmed-down, scrollable view that eliminates many of the distracting elements. Safari 5 can detect both single and multipage articles and allows you to toggle the Reader mode to display the article, print it, or share it via e-mail.

If you haven’t tried it, you should—it works pretty well. It’s also going to make a lot of people—those who think that splashing ads in my face all day is the right way to catch my attention¹—really unhappy because they no longer hold the power to make us consume their content the way we want. For my part, I very much like the idea of getting access to my content in an isolated, easily readable and well-laid-out format. Publishers are probably going to think that Apple is trying to screw them, whereas they should really start to realize that this is the way people want to be able to consume content on the web: no pagination, no interstitials, no popups, no stupid “windows” that fly across the screen.

Apple’s defence of this new functionality is going to be that the user still needs to visit a page in order to take advantage of Reader. The counterpoint is that Reader does away completely with the formatting of that page, so, if your site relies on advertising clicks to make money, you’re going to take a big hit.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Readability has been around for a while, but it’s still a niche scriptlet that you need to discover, and it’s not that popular among the non-tech crowd. Reader, on the other hand, is built straight into the browser, which puts it within reach of anyone. I see two possible outcomes if this kind of functionality catches on with other browsers: either site owners are going to start banning Safari users—hey, stupidity flows eternal—or ads and marketing are going to start becoming more integrated within the content. Of course, the whole thing could fizzle and nothing might happen, too.