Writers I Read: Marco Arment
Since text can flow around other page elements and can be infinitely messed with, publishers have crammed a lot of distracting elements into their text layouts, and have often laid things out in a way that isn’t comfortable for some (or many) people to read.
Since text is so easy to skim and is so often browsed while multitasking in a busy personal-computer environment, people have grown accustomed to skimming through web articles quickly, leading to high demand for (and therefore even higher supply of) shallow, skimmable content such as “listicles”.
Instapaper solves both of these problems: it dramatically increases legibility and reduces distractions when reading, and it makes it easier to attentively read long, detailed, or nuanced writing. And while it won’t change entire industries, Instapaper has succeeded, to at least a small degree, in increasing demand for (and therefore, slowly, increasing supply of) more of this sort of writing online.
