Instapaper Is My Kindle’s Best Friend
Mar 22, 2010 by Will Mernagh
Instapaper started out as a simple idea. A site to store articles for reading at a later time. Basically you bookmark articles on their site, then go there when you have some free time and catch up. There is a handy bookmarklet you can add to you browsers bookmark bar. When you are on any webpage of interest just click the “Read Later” bookmark and it saves the site for future reading.
I used to keep sites I wanted to read later in a folder in my bookmarks. I rarely removed articles from there so this grew large and messy in no time. Instapaper actually removes the articles you have read after you read them. If you want to keep interesting ones then you can just “Star” them too. This is a much better way of staying organized.
Why use it? Well I know I have a problem when online where I’ll be reading something on Wikipedia or another site and before I know it I have moved 10 sites deep from links.
Wiki → World Cup 2010 → Beckam Injures Leg → Scandinavian Therapies → Scandinavian Women.Some of the pages along the way are interesting and I always mean to go back someday. Or else I find myself actually spending hours online reading each page. This is very unproductive. Enter Instapaper. I can just click the link hit “read later” and know I will get to it at some stage.
This is especially handy at work when you are looking for a good book/tutorial on some new technology but get distracted along the way by an interesting blog post.
Now where does my Kindle come into this you may be asking. Well Instapaper has the ability to email a Kindle formatted version of all the articles you marked as to read over the last week. The file works like a newspaper with each page you marked as “Read Later” an article. So you can skip to the next article simply. You can also go to Instapaper and have them send you the file at any time. Now since sending the files to your Kindle costs a few cents there is even an option to not send the file if it contains less than a set number of articles. You can also download it for transfer via USB.
It is really great. You may even use it to read the newspaper based on the online version. Spend a few minutes clicking on the online editions articles of interest, add them to Instapaper, email them to your Kindle and hay presto.
I also use Instapaper with Tweetie on my iPhone. When I see an interesting tweet with a link I can hit the built in “Read Later” button and it adds it to my Instapaper. It asks you for you password the first time and then remembers it. So I can now get a good tweet at work and not get distracted.