I never used Reader but I see this question a lot, and feel that the framing of it clouds insight.
The problem isn't making things, it's all of the barriers to entry. For example, say it takes 2 weeks to make something. Since most of us have to work, that means a 1 year commitment to save enough to do it over a vacation. Which is really a 2 year commitment until a vacation, or 1 year of grinding, or the sacrifice of vacations altogether, or nights and weekends for an indeterminate amount of time. On top of that, most people struggle to save 10% of their income. So if a project has even a $10,000 budget, that requires $100,000 of income. The numbers quickly become so insurmountable that an adult will almost never find the time that they had as a teenager. A decade may pass in the blink of an eye with no forward progress on life goals (that's happened to me twice now). And most projects take 6 months to 2 years or more..
So major projects can only really happen through a corporate structure or with outside funding. Then the problem becomes organizational, or founders spend most of their time fundraising. Sure, occasionally someone makes something. But traditionally there are 100 failures we never hear about. Today that number might be more like 1,000 or 10,000.
Google axing projects on a whim is power imbalance. They hold all of the cards, have almost unbounded potential, but are so hyper-focused on profit today that they can't seem to innovate on anything. Major corporations today are basically black holes sucking up all available capital and talent, performing no better than small 2-5 person teams would if they had adequate resources.
I'm sure someone will react vehemently against what I'm saying. But we're discussing this on Y Combinator's website, a startup accelerator founded on the idea that small teams can pivot faster than the biggest companies. After writing this out, it seems that only startups can save us. Are any working on a Reader alternative, I wonder.
Also I dream of the day when the musical chairs of competition stop and we move to a post-scarcity society. I thought that was going to happen around the year 2000, but if anything we've slid backwards since wealth inequality is the highest it's been in human history.