His new book, Design Professionalism, is available now to read online (free) or for download to your iPad or Kindle for $9. I bought it sight unseen. It’s the least I could do.

It’s a troubling trend, to be sure. The only difference is, Amazon was doing just fine before Lendle, and will be fine without it. But where would Twitter be—and more importantly, where will it go—without a vital developer community?

Boy, if my business relied on the good graces of a giant web service and unfettered access to its API, I’d be changing my undies right about now.

1. Unlike Jeff, I love reading books and have always taken advantage of the nearest public library.

The honeypot around eBooks is to think only in terms of artifact. When, in fact, artifact is the just a thin (and thinner still) surface layer built atop a cacophony of systems and scaffolding. Those systems are where the real change is happening. Affecting the future of the book is one part understanding the processes of reading, one part understanding writing, and one part understanding publishing.

— In praise of shadows

What I saw (and used) was a multimedia-rich book running on an iPhone 4. There is no UI chrome. No status bar at the top or tab bar at the bottom. It’s just like you see in the still image on their teaser site. The entire screen is filled by content, not user interface elements. The screen is the book, the book is the screen.

…

Kindle and iBooks seem to have the goal of reproducing what is possible in paper books. Yes, iBooks supports embedded video and audio content, but it does so in a way that feels as though Apple pondered what it would be like if you could play video on a piece of paper. Push Pop’s concept strikes me as far more ambitious: What can we do with the idea of a “book” if we eliminate the limitations of ink and paper, rather than mimic them? E-books that aren’t merely rendered by software, but rather e-books that are software.

Eleven months ago, Andy Clarke announced the forthcoming iPadification of Hardboiled Web Design. That hasn’t happened yet, but I stand by my comments at that time:

If Andy does succeed in publishing his new book as an iPad app with demos and video tutorials, that will truly herald the future of books. Physical, typeset books have their place, but if you’re publishing something electronically, there ought to be a big, flashing sign demanding you use every advantage the medium affords. To do otherwise is no different than playing a radio broadcast on television or scanning a newspaper and calling it a website.

Congratulations to Mike Matas and company for realizing that vision so emphatically.

The site is nicely designed, the tone is clear and purposeful: by agreeing to donate at least $5 / month to Readability you contribute to a sustainable system of writing and reading on the Internet. It’s a clever and hopeful premise along the lines of Kickstarter, tip jars, shareware, and myriad other altruistic revenue schemes designed to convince users that something they already get for free deserves to be paid for directly. The twist is that you’re still actually supporting your favorite authors only indirectly. Readability reserves 30 percent of your monthly fee and, at least for now, offers no way to control the distribution of the other 70 percent.

By tracking the number of articles you read from each publisher, Readability determines how to divide your donation. Right now, that means clicking a Readability button embedded on the site, hitting your personal Readability bookmarklet, or saving the article to read later in Instapaper. If profiting from Readability (the service) is something publishers desire to do, it seems inescapable that readability (the experience) will suffer. Prodding people toward using Readability means at minimum including Readability links and could conceivably entail yet more site advertising to further segregate those who will tolerate ads and those who resort to services like Readability to escape. This is an admittedly cynical view of the publisher reaction, yet it is but one of many perverse incentives of the new Readability.

If Readability is in fact tracking only clicks and not time spent on the site, what type of writing does that promote? More frequent, disposable articles at the expense of considered analysis and user-friendly features. What of feed readers, competing time-shifting apps, and system utilities like Safari Reader? On this point, at least, Readability appears to be well prepared. The API ought to allow Readability tracking as ubiquitously as Instapaper integration.

Go Team.

Everybody wants to see the new Readability succeed. Independent publishers (like us) will be happy to accrue pennies here and there as an article gets picked up by a larger publication and readers stream in. Full Stop is registered for such an eventuality. Ironically, these sites are frequently the most well-designed and, thus, least in need of Readability’s service. The best way to support your favorite publishers will always be directly.

Still, Readability may want to consider expanding their offering to include an easy-to-update whitelist of sites that are automatically tallied as you browse. For sake of example, each time you end up at Marco.org and have the Readability add-on installed in your browser the clock starts ticking. Alternatively, a one-click way to mark an article as read without necessarily invoking the Readability interface would suffice.

Whether larger publications like the New York Times get on board is difficult to predict. It’s unlikely the Readability community will achieve enough mass in the near future to make a noticeable contribution to the revenue of something of that scale, yet the process is so simple and the risk so low there appears to be nothing preventing just that from occurring.

Will Readability succeed in displacing advertising? Perhaps, but only by proxy and even then only partially. If the burgeoning success of utilities that hide obnoxious ads and simultaneously encourage readers to pay directly for services rendered is heeded, we may well be on the precipice of better-designed, more respectful interfaces.

Most likely, this is wishful thinking. The vast majority of people are predisposed to trade time and irritation — not money — for information. The best outcome that can be reasonably expected is a minor overall shift away from visually loud pages, a decent alternative for those willing to pay, and a foothold for thoughtful, tenacious people like Marco and Arc90 to purvey delight.