The irony really does make the case better than the article itself. I've been using Articyl for a while, RSS feeds, saved articles, and podcasts all in one place. The saved article reader strips everything back to just the content, so no 37MB surprises. It can also send your reading list to a Kindle as PDF/EPUB over email if you want to get away from screens entirely.
I've gated narrations at the minute outside of trials as each narration costs me money to create, but currently I have the functionality to use the mobile devices sharing feature to bring sites into the app, from there you can request narrations on individual articles.
Interesting point on audio books though, I might look into creating a single narration for batches of articles in the same way I currently do for PDF/EPUB.
I hadnt thought about that one but it sounds like a really good idea. I might combine it with something like exclusive offers for top submitters, I'm sure some of the venues would go for it in turn for the advertising.
I'm trying to work out some sort of gaming mechanic, just trying to work out what the reward would be as I'm not sure badges on a site like this would be enough.
I take your point about the advertising, I think I will look at hiding that bar until there is much bigger audience.
Its designed to work global but I intend to only push it in my local town to start with where I can seed the data myself with the hope that it will slowly grow outwards from there.
If you set your location to "Brighton, United Kingdom" you can see some of this seed data that I'm working on.