By Steve Bass

Readability: Read Web Pages Without Clutter
Junk and clutter: It's the blaring banner ads and annoying boxes that slide across the screen that are ruining the Web. I avoid it all with a smart ad blocker -- Ad Muncher, a miraculous tool.

But there's still a problem.

Web pages aren't designed for reading, and that's one of my pleasures: Reading product and movie reviews, for instance, or devouring John McPhee's lengthy pieces in The New Yorker, or James Fallows (read his old, but still valuable What Was I Thinking? in The Atlantic).

Up until now, I'd click the Print button if the site offered one. Then I discovered Readability, a site that reformats any page of text to conform to your reading style. Set up Readability by choosing a style, font size, and margin width, and then drag the Readability bookmarklet to your browser's toolbar. The next time you're on a Web page you want to read, click the Readability link and the transformation happens immediately. (You can get a better idea by watching the video.)

Arc90 calls Readability an experiment. I say it's a keeper. Get more details at the Readability blog.

Atlantic article before using Readability.

Atlantic article after using Readability.

ARTICLE CONTINUED HERE

This post is excerpted with Steve's permission from his TechBite blog.

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