Amazon owns (or licenses) that content and is therefore 'publishing' it. Readability doesn't own or control the content, they are simply rearranging it like an intelligent RSS reader.
At a fundamental level Amazon take written content, pay the owner of the content money and sell it on at a mark up based on reformatting it in a way which adds value to the consumer.
How is that different to the way that Readability take written content, pay the owner of the content money, and sell it on at a mark up based on reformatting it in a way which adds value to the consumer?
The key difference between Readability and an RSS reader, is the RSS reader hands no money to the content creator.
I don't like this as I like the idea of Readability but I can't dispute that what they do is basically the same as what Amazon do.
One thing I would say is that I think Readability get a lot of credit for the fact that they will distribute payments to small content creators.
While this is obviously great, I'd be really interested to know how much of what they pay out goes to bloggers and how much goes to the usual suspects. I'm guessing that in reality it doesn't end up supporting the small guys as much as we'd like simply because most of what is read comes from the big providers - that's why they're big in the first place.
