I printed the New Yorker article about Paul Haggis and Scientology and now there aren't any trees left in the world. Sorry, everybody. (@johnmoe)

@johnmoe I saw how long the New Yorker's Paul Haggis article was and @instapaper'd it to my Kindle. No trees and fewer watts needed. (@kawika)

CONTENT sites (other than this newspaper's, of course) often appear to view readers' attention as a commodity to be diced up, then bartered or sold. Part is flogged to advertisers. Part is handed off to editors who try to ensure visitors stick around the site for a bit—like flies in honey—rather than buzzing off elsewhere. Part is given up to navigational gubbins meant to make the site stickier still. Only a small portion is devoted to the reason people come to a website in the first place: the unique article, blog post, or other entry found there.

Two years ago Arc90, a technology-strategy firm, created Readability. This free piece of software let readers reclaim 100% of their attention by stripping cluttered websites of all the superfluous bells and whistles. It began life as a bit of browser code encapsulated into a bookmarklet, a self-contained mini-program you plop into a browser's bookmark toolbar or in a bookmark menu. Tap Readability on a page with a block of continuous words and, lo and behold, everything but the text disappears. The software rewrites the text in reasonably-sized black type, and unfurls it over a white background that resembles a book page.

The firm then released Readability's underlying code under a broad free license. Apple picked it up for a reading-mode feature in its Safari browser, and it was built into plugins for other browsers. Soon it became a common noun, at least in some milieus. Readability was inspired by Instapaper, a service developed by Marco Arment, a former head programmer at Tumblr. Mr Arment also had based his free service on a bookmarklet. Click Read Later, and a stripped-down version of a page is stored in your account on his server, along with a link back to the original page.

Readability has since metamorphosed into a standalone company of the same name. It is now a fee-based web service with many elements in common with Instapaper, including archiving stories in your account, but aimed at providing a cash stream from readers to publishers. An Apple iOS app is around the corner. As a result, Readability competes with donation-based payment systems aimed at publishers like Flattr, Kachingle or Sprinklepenny. Like these, Readability collects a few dollars each month from every subscriber (though higher contribution are possible) and distributes about 70% of the revenue to participating publishers (its competitors distribute 80% to 90%).

But it differs in important ways, too. First and foremost, the other three pitch themselves to users along the lines of public radio and television, aiming to cast publishers—whether humble bloggers or media conglomerates—in the role of put-upon content providers pleading for spare change. On the face of it, then, they are looking to ride on readers' guilt or selflessness.

Richard Ziade, Readability's boss, prefers to rely on his customers' simple, unadulterated self-interest: I want to read this now, or I want to read this later, but I want to read it without all the irritating frippery. In this respect, Readability is more akin to crowdfunding operations, where a bonus is offered to entice a small-time donor to become a fully fledged patron. These extras range from a dinner with the creator of whatever it is that is being crowdfunded (often artistic projects) to what is, in effect, an exclusive advance pre-purchase. In Readability's case, the bonus is its core archiving and text-conversion function.

Another difference is that unlike Flattr or Kachingle (but not Sprinklepenny), Readability does not require a content site to put a badge on every page for readers to click on in order to indicate that a micropayment has been made. Any such badge or widget means introducing new code in the website's innards. It also means readers cannot donate to unaffiliated websites.

Although Readability does offer publishers the option of including "Read Now" and "Read Later" widgets on their content pages, which lets users dispense with a bookmarklet or a browser plug-in, it does not require that they do. Instead, the software tracks the pages it converts and archives, promising to hold the fees for all sites visited by its subscribers in the form of self-administered escrow. Any site that decides to adopt the widget will receive its share of fees collected from the service's inception. 

However, the firm faces the same problems as any micropayment system. It must reach a critical mass of subscribers to make the revenue drip appealing to the biggest publishers who will then, hopefully, reel in more subscribers. The rub is that big publishers' sites typically brim with precisely the sort of unwanted clutter Readability targets. Removing it may annoy such clutter's main purveyors, ie, advertisers, who also frequently happen to be such sites' principal sources of revenue. True, for Readability to work its pruning magic, a page must load in full first; only once a visitor has beheld it in all its glory may he choose to pare it down. But that decision can be made rapidly—that is, after all, the whole point. Giving readers full command of their attention implies having to wrest some of it from the ad men. In this regard, at least, surfing the web remains a zero-sum game.