Re:Who Was Kafka?
by Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd on Sunday February 14, 2016 @12:01PM
(#11098964)
https://blendle.com/
It's only targeting the Netherlands and Germany right now, but a few big name papers from the US are already available. And it's an app instead of a website. Apparently you can even get refunds for articles after reading them.
Thanks, happy to have found out about this, bookmarked. Though, I'd like to be able to stay on the website of the content provider, and be able to get a PDF of the page, as I archive some articles I read. It's not clear if this service provides these, I'll try to see if it does.
Re:Who Was Kafka?
by manigandham on Sunday February 14, 2016 @04:20PM
(#11100062)
This is in the works (by me and several other companies). Scale, technical issues, politics and business models are why this will take a long time to make happen.
I'm looking forward to see implementations then. Now given that you're working on one such tool, I'll give you some pre-feedback: please provide support for offline, non-locked-in archival of text, ie plain text and PDF or PostScript files. It's a key feature, if I pay the price of a paper tabloid for that article, I would want to be immune to dead links and silent modifications. Hope you have success with your enterprise.
I'd happily pay if I was charged 25-50 cents per article. But I wouln't want to have to subscribe to the entire magazine for only one article. I do not think the would be many who only follow a few preferred mags online, people usually end up on articles via links, and read the article and do not see the website until they bump into some other link to it.
But if the abovementioned service existed, where I had deposited some amount, and the mag had a link, "Connect with Readbettr to read the rest of the article", after a compelling abstract, and when I clicked, it automatically charged me ¢50 and let me read the article, with a single login, and it sent me a PDF copy automatically, I'd be a happy paying user of many online news and content sources.
This thing does not exist, and I leave the idea here for the taking. Someone please make this.