That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. I see you're a PhD student. What if I wrote a program that would let people republish your research in full without your prior consent? Yes, I could add a feature that limits this program to only working with research that's been approved for it, but that seems quite complicated.
This Readbility service is wrong. I guess that's why it's popular?
"What if I wrote a program that would let people republish your research in full without your prior consent"
Do it.
Incidentally, my hack isn't the original Readability service. My inspiration is http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
You may be ok with it, but what about all the other folks out there? Checking with each of them would be the right thing to do, but complicated.
The culture of lifting original information and data regardless of the wishes of the original creator is a bad thing.
So perhaps there's a startup opportunity here, for a system that secures permission from people who are ok with their content being reproduced without their prior consent.
Perhaps there could be a service that creates a list of web sites where the content is licensed Creative Commons. Then, if someone was going to create a web app like this, they could filter that list against their web app to only include sites that have been licensed creative commons.
Similarly stripping the navigation also makes it easier to read, but then it loses it's value as a website.
I wonder if there is a readability wordpress plugin that could display the readability version in a JS pop-up overlay. I think if I can find one, I'll add that to my site.
Edit: I just tried it on DaringFireball. Beautiful.