diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index e03c05f..f192510 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -1,29 +1,29 @@
-Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) is a superset of JSON's schema that's faster and more compact.
+An implementation of [RFC 7049](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7049) - Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) in Python, including a C-accelerated implementation.
 
-* http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7049
-* http://cbor.io/
+[CBOR](https://cbor.io/) is comparable to JavaScript Object Notation (JSON); it has a superset of JSON’s ability, but serializes to a binary format which is smaller and faster to generate and parse. The `cbor` library provides convenient `loads()` and `dumps()` methods like the `json` standard library for JSON.
 
-This Python implementation provides loads()/dumps() like the json standard library.
+The C-accelerated implemenation runs 3-5 times faster than the Python standard library's C-accelerated implementation of JSON. The following compares the `cbor` library to the standard `json` library in Python 2.7:
 
-Compare to Python 2.7.5's standard library implementation of json:
+```bash
+serialized 50000 objects:
+  into 1163097 cbor bytes in 0.05 seconds (1036613.48/s)
+  and 1767001 json bytes in 0.22 seconds (224772.48/s)
 
-```
-#!
-
-serialized 50000 objects into 1163097 cbor bytes in 0.05 seconds (1036613.48/s) and 1767001 json bytes in 0.22 seconds (224772.48/s)
 compress to 999179 bytes cbor.gz and 1124500 bytes json.gz
-load 50000 objects from cbor in 0.07 secs (763708.80/sec) and json in 0.32 (155348.97/sec)
+
+load 50000 objects:
+  from cbor in 0.07 secs (763708.80/sec)
+  and json in 0.32 (155348.97/sec)
 ```
 
-There is also a pure-python implementation which gets about 1/3 the speed of json's C augmented speed.
+There is also a pure-python implementation which gets about 1/3 the speed of the standard `json` C-accelerated speed.
 
 Tested in Python 2.7.5, 2,7.6, 3.3.3, 3.4.0, and 3.5.2
 
-Available on pypi:
+[Listed on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/cbor/) the `cbor` library can be installed using:
 
+```bash
 pip install cbor
+````
 
----
-
-For Go implementation, see:
-https://github.com/brianolson/cbor_go
\ No newline at end of file
+For an equivalent Go implementation, see https://github.com/brianolson/cbor_go