Save reading long articles for later with Instapaper

June 23rd, 2009 by Scott Wolf

If you’ve never heard of Instapaper, it’s a fairly useful and relatively unknown pseudo-bookmarking tool that allows you to quickly save the long articles you may come across on the web on a daily basis for later reading. In other words, it “facilitates easy reading of long text content.”

A lot of times, with the overabundance of information we encounter on a given day—from email to chats to link sharing to RSS feeds—it’s very difficult to find time to do anything but skim articles and web pages. The guy behind Instapaper, however, contends that there’s little value in quickly skimming content, and that good writing, especially writing that is supposed to be of interest to you, deserves to be read. He also points out that although it may not seem like we have time anymore to sit down and really read, there are certainly times during the day—whether it be while sitting in the waiting room at our doctor’s office, tapping our foot in line at the post office, waiting for a meeting to start, commuting (if you happen to take public transportation to work), or while “sitting on the goofy chairs in the shoe area and being supportive while our wives are shopping”—when we could be catching up on reading what’s of interest to us. To help facilitate this, you’ll find the website is very much mobile-browser-friendly, it’s a totally free service, and there’s even an Instapaper iPhone app available. Great for catching up while sitting in the shoe department.

Overall, the nature of the site is less along the lines of social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Digg or Reddit, and more along the lines of say, the unsorted bookmarks feature found in Firefox. Its purpose is for quick saving of articles for later reading, rather than the formal bookmarking and tagging/categorizing features found in the aforementioned sites. It’s not really meant for long-term storage. Some people may not like this “unorganized” approach, but I think the creator addresses it nicely when he says it should be used for its purpose—temporary storage of links to articles you’d like to read when you have the time.

The easiest way to get started is to visit Instapaper.com, find the “Read Later” bookmarklet, and drag it into the bookmarks toolbar of your favorite web browser. Now any time you come across an article you want to save, just click the bookmarklet and it automatically saves to your account. I definitely recommend trying it.

— Scott Wolf

This entry was posted by Scott Wolf on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 and is filed under Mobile Web, Problem Solving, Rants and Raves, Sites We Like, Technology, Trend Spotting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.