I love learning new things. For someone like me, the internet is a never-ending source of insights. It’s my source of answers when I’m curious about something, and my cell phone, tablets and computers are reading devices for Kindle books, Safari books, and facts and opinions from all over the web. I travel the internet where my curiosity and current problem-solving needs lead me.
Up until recently, I had a problem. My internet habit kept producing a virtual explosion of browser tabs. I’d do a search and find a number of promising articles that were too long to read right away. Wanting to come back to them, I’d leave them open in their own browser tabs. Over time I’d wind up with tons of tiny tabs making it hard for me to distinguish between things I was actively working on and things I wasn’t. I’d rearrange tab orders often, and do a deliberate cull a few times a week. Fortunately, I was recently introduced to a cure for this affliction: the read-later app.
The discovery
A couple of months ago I decided to start this blog. Knowing very little about authoring and publishing blogs, I started with some research. What software should I use? WordPress seemed to be the most popular so I searched through Safari for books that would help me start a WordPress blog. I browsed through a few and settled on one in particular to read in detail: Create your own Blog by Tris Hussey. It contained a lot of really useful advice, including the fact that he used Instapaper to note things to read later. I put down his book, got out my laptop and went to the Instapaper site right away to sign up for a free account. I downloaded the app on my iPhone and iPad, started saving content, and was immediately hooked. A few days later I upgrade to the paid version.
What’s a read-later app?
The name “read-later app” is pretty self-explanatory. Instapaper, and applications like it, allow you to easily save content from browsers and other applications that you want to come back to later. They keep a list of things you want to read or view later, allow you to organize and file content for later reference, and of course to search through things. They aren’t simply lists of links. They actually upload the text and images into a nice reader view for you. Most also have some sort of social features to allow you to easily share things you like with others.
Instapaper vs Pocket
Though I immediately loved Instapaper, I always like to check out the competition. The most recommended alternative read-later app seems to be Pocket, with reviewers citing better handling of images and multimedia content as key improvements over Instapaper. Reviewers also mentioned that Pocket is allows you to tag content for more flexibility in organizing things versus Instapaper which only lets you file articles into folders.
Everything sounded good, so I signed up for Pocket thinking there was a good chance I’d switch over. Unfortunately, I found out pretty quickly that Pocket didn’t offer one of the features that was most important to me – the quick and easy ability to highlight and make notes on things.
Where Instapaper is focused on allowing you to save content for yourself, with a bit of sharing on the side, Pocket seems to be more of a content recommendation application. You can highlight something, but only to share it. It forces you to go through a dialog and choose where you want to share the excerpt. This wasn’t at all what I was looking for. I was looking for something more like the highlight option you have in Kindle or Safari – which I found in Instapaper but not in Pocket.
I still have Pocket installed, and I may find more uses for it later, but for my current needs, Instapaper is a better fit. Your mileage may vary though. If you’re looking for a more detailed comparison as well as some information on other alternatives, I recommend this sweetsetup.com article.
Other nice Instapaper features
Besides the highlighting feature, there are some other features I like in Instapaper. One fun feature is the speed reading feature. Instapaper can present articles one word at a time on a sliding scale of reading speeds from 250 to 650 words a minute. As someone who does a lot of reading, I appreciate a feature that can help me to read faster.
Another nice feature is the estimated reading time. Instapaper tells you how long an article is in minutes, and estimates the time remaining as you read too, so if you just have a short time, you can choose what to read based on how much time you have. It also synchronizes your reading location (article and position within the article) across devices, so you might be reading on your laptop and then switch to your phone or tablet and easily continue where you left off.
Text-to-speech is also offered in the Instapaper iOS and Android apps – though not in the main web app, so you can safely create a playlist of articles to have read to you while you drive. Of course this isn’t as pleasant as listening to a book read by a real human, but it’s still a nice option to have.
Things that could be done better
Of course no tool is perfect. Instapaper’s reading experience is great, but it sometimes strips out images and videos that should be part of the article. When this happens, it isn’t hard to just click on the link to the original article to read it there, but it would be better to have to do this less often.
Instapaper’s full text search could be better too I think. It isn’t terrible and they’ve made recent improvements, but it isn’t a shining example of search at its best either.
Instapaper also doesn’t support PDF files, which is really too bad. I often find articles in PDF form that I’d like to read later.
Finally, as someone who is admittedly quite new to social sharing (starting this blog was a big step outside my comfort zone of connecting directly with colleagues on LinkedIn), I found the help around the social parts of Instapaper to be a bit lacking. I’m sure it seems obvious to many people how it works, but it wasn’t clear enough to me exactly what would happen when I connected a social account and selected one or both of the sharing options (“likes” and “notes”), or how much control I might have over what was posted to my connected account and when.
Give it a try
Whatever your particular preference is – Instapaper, Pocket, or even a slightly different approach like a bookmarking service (I’ve read some good things about Pinboard), if you’re reading this blog then you’re probably someone who could benefit from Instapaper or something similar. Strangely enough, nobody I know had actually mentioned using a read-later application to me, but now that I’ve found Instapaper I use it every day and can’t imagine how I got along without it.