How To Read The Link-Crazy Web Without Going Insane
BY Kevin Purdy
Feel like your attention span operates at an inverse rate to
your broadband speed? Here's how you can give the good stuff on
the web the attention it deserves.
The kind of long-form reading you can do right now, on your
computer or mobile phone, at the speed of a Google search,
involves animated advertisements, multi-page articles smooshed
into strange margins, and lots of attention-grabbing links to
outside material. The kind of reading you want to do gives the
material undivided attention, puts you in touch with your
thoughts, and is much easier on your eyes.
There are, thankfully, tools to bridge the divide between the
gratification of the web and the illumination of actual reading.
Strip down and simplify your text
The inconvenience and distraction of web reading has been
addressed by a few different web geeks and entrepreneurs in a
mostly similar fashion. If you don't mind reading on a screen,
but want that screen far less cluttered, these are the tools to
turn to:
* ininInstapaper The king of clean text and convenience. First
you drag Marco Arment "Read Later" tool into your browser's
favorites/bookmarks collection. Then, whenever you see an
article you want to read click the button. This will save your
stories at the Instapaper website (which requires registration),
and allow it be to read anytime via an iPhone or iPad app, or on
your Kindle. One tip: view the article in a single page or
printer-friendly version before you tap the Read Later button.
* ininReadability As a pure text-and-images reading tool,
Readability does a good job, and it's easy to install on most
browsers. To read articles later, though, and feel better about
stripping out advertising, Readability asks for a minimum of $5
per month from readers, which it's trying as hard as it can to
send to great content creators--publications, bloggers, whomever.
If you're using the latest version of Safari, some of
Readability's features are built into a new "Reader" mode
* ininRead It Later A simple app that lets you do what it says,
on nearly any device you have with a screen. Send good reads
right to your Kindle. Got a Kindle? Thinking about getting one
of those sleek new Kindle Fire tablets? Do some quality reading
on your thin little screen, both hand-picked and expertly
curated. Delivereads takes compelling content from around the
web and pushes it wirelessly to your Kindle, with no effort on
your part. Tinderizer makes it a one-click process to send web
articles to your Kindle, where email and Wikipedia and Twitter
won't be able to find you for a while.
Have your computer read any text out loud to you
Computer-generated voices have improved, to the point where
only the occasional five-dollar word or proper name gets a bit
mangled. If you've got an article you want to get through, but
just don't have time not to double-task, enlist your headphones
or computer speakers.
On a Mac, you can open up System Preferences, hit the Speech
section, and look in the "Text to Speech" tab. There's a box
there to "Speak selected text when the key is pressed," which you
should tick on, and then a "Set key" button, where you choose the
keyboard combo you want to start reading what you see on your
screen. Windows users can either dig into their "Ease of Access"
settings in the Control Panel, or try an app like Balabolka Both
apps work best after your web reading has been run through one of
the cruft strippers mentioned earlier.
Speed up your audiobooks (or any spoken word files)
If your literary-minded friends think that audiobooks aren't
really reading, they're really going to flip when they hear that
you've been clipping through books at nearly twice the standard
speed. It's easy, but not quite obvious, to change the playback
speed on any file on any iPhone, iPod, iPad or in Windows Media
Player. On Android phones, both the official Audible app, and
Osplay let you cut faster through your self-imposed reading list.
Copyright B) 2011 Mansueto Ventures LLC. All rights reserved.
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