I ♥ Instapaper

by Apr 18, 2011Tech3 comments

I checked, and only a few of the cool people—by no means all—are using Instapaper. I’m here to change that. Cool people of the world, unite!

You’ve just got to try Instapaper, especially if you have a Kindle and/or an iPod Touch like me.

All you do is install a Firefox extension which gives you a nice little button. Run across an article you’d like to read but can’t read right now? Click the button. Right away, your Instapaper account downloads the article and puts it in your to-read list.

It also strips the article of all but the article: no ads, no fine print at the bottom, no header, no buttons (pictures are generally included if they’re clearly part of the body of the article).

The Firefox extension I use also lets me strip all that extraneous stuff from within my web browser through the complementary service called Readability.

After your list of articles populates with a few choice gems, you can access them easily through an iPod Touch or similar device. (To have more than 10 articles at a time, I believe, will cost you $5—I ponied up because I knew what a value this would be to me.)

And here’s the coolest thing: Instapaper can automatically send all your articles to your Kindle in an easy-to-read format.

Also worth checking out if you have a Kindle: Kindlefeeder.

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3 Comments
  1. Jon B

    Thanks,

    Looks helpful. Have you found a way to save only the text of a website into rtf/doc format quickly (in order to file on your computer)?

    I would really like to the instapaper functionality (extracting only the text) that is downloadable.

  2. Mark L Ward Jr

    You have a Mac, don’t you? If so, you could click “Readability” on a given article and then simply hit Cmd+A, Cmd+C, and then paste it in a TextEdit window. I set up Spark to open TextEdit with Cmd+F2, so this would be really fast for me.

  3. Jon B

    That will work nicely. Thanks.