Whenever I come across an article and reach the bottom of the page and see this…
I tend to have three reactions:
- Greedy publishers just want more page views!
- 10 more pages?! I don’t have the committment to go through all of that!
- I wish there was a ‘single-page’ view mode.
Bookmarking service Instapaper has a feature that I absolutely love: whenever you save articles to Instapaper, it converts any multipage article into a single, readable page. No more navigating to the next/previous section. No more ADD symptoms. Everything you wanted to read, the way it should be.
Publishers must hate this feature for one obvious reason: money. Ars Technica for instance, offers a premium subscription to their content with one of the main selling points being single-page views of their articles.
Interestingly, Instapaper creator Marco Arment blogged a year ago about his deliberate refusal to implement this feature. With competition like Pocket(formerly Read it Later) and Safari’s built-in Reader offering this feature, perhaps this has changed Arment’s mind?
