Instapaper, or how I got back to reading articles

At some point I gave up reading articles through RSS aggregators like Google Reader altogether. It was a social problem. Articles piled up in the reader at Formula 1 speed, and it was frustrating because I didn’t have time to go through them. I ran into something similar on Twitter, with one difference. Someone I followed would recommend the truly good articles. Twitter’s big advantage is that it’s easy to use on a phone, computer or tablet. If a tweet linked to an article that caught my attention, I’d click and it would show up right away. It still didn’t quite work for me. An article often took me away from work in progress. And when something really interested me, I’d read through its linked sources too, because I knew I’d never come back to them or would forget.

It didn’t feel good. I’d read something and feel guilty about stepping away from work, or struggle to get back into it. If I didn’t read it, sooner or later I’d forget about it and miss useful information. I spent a few years wavering between reading and leaving my work alone. A smartphone helped a little. I could read Twitter and articles when they wouldn’t distract me from work or use up scarce mental energy. Reading on a phone has pitfalls, though. Sites aren’t always optimized for phones in display size or the amount of data they load. Try loading TheServerSide while changing trains at Můstek. I still needed a way to read things later without leaving my work. What finally rescued me was Instapaper, a wonderful service that seems to do the job.

Instapaper

Instapaper is a web app you can send an article to and read it in later. The trick is that it downloads the article, formats it and sends it in a format suited to whichever device you want to read it on. On a laptop you can see it as originally published or in an optimized version with no ads and a consistent font. On a phone, articles automatically download in the optimized format. It’s very fast because you’re essentially transferring plain text. The text size and formatting suit a mobile device too. You can have articles delivered to your Kindle. Links work beautifully when you read an article in Instapaper. The app asks whether you want to follow a link or send the linked article to Instapaper right away. Each account has a unique email address you can send messages to. They’re processed just like articles. You can also share articles on social networks, categorize them and archive them to return to later.

I’ve found a few limitations I’d like to see improved. Instapaper doesn’t process PDFs. If you wanted to send it your favorite paper as a PDF, you’re out of luck. For understandable reasons, it can’t handle articles that require authentication. I haven’t seen OAuth support (update: it works from the browser bookmarklet). One other thing may not be a limitation at all. The iPhone app costs money. I don’t mind. Running and developing a service like this isn’t cheap, and the few dollars I paid for the app ($3.99) were well worth it.

The upsides and other good things about Instapaper

• No more switching context between work and articles or leaving an article halfway through to follow its references
• Articles are available in a format optimized for mobile devices
• It works for email
• You can categorize and share articles