As you’ve no doubt noticed, there’s a lot to read on the internet. Vast numbers of new articles are published every day. There’s still quite a lot of it not being written by AI, too.
Trying to keep up with everything can feel exhausting, and that’s where read-it-later apps come in. These apps will queue up content that catches your eye as you go to and fro across the web, and keep these articles, videos, blog posts, and social media updates bookmarked until you get a chance to catch up with them. When it’s time to dig in, the apps present the articles in a clean, uncluttered layout.
It’s a neat idea, but it needs to be well implemented for it to work—otherwise you can spend more time compiling and organizing your reading than actually catching up on your queue.
Instapaper is one of the oldest read-it-later apps, having launched back in 2008. It’s also still one of the best options, even more so now that it’s been given a major revamp. Here’s what’s new, and why it might be worth your while diving back into your Instapaper account (or signing up for the first time).
Instapaper Basics
Instapaper offers a clean, distraction-free reading environment.Photograph: David Nield
Instapaper is available for the web, Android, and iOS, and reflows web articles into a tidily arranged, distraction-free format that doesn’t feature any ads, menus, or other onscreen furniture. You just get the text and the images, so reading the articles you’ve saved is a more pleasurable experience than it is on the web.
You can customize the Instapaper interface in a variety of ways. The apps let you change the font style, size, and spacing, and adjust the background color of the “paper” that the text and images are placed on.
Everything is neatly arranged on the screen, too. You get estimates for how long each article will take to read (as well as the option to see summaries of the text). You can use folders and tags to categorize saved posts in a variety of ways. Also, everything syncs seamlessly across all the devices you’re using Instapaper on.
Getting articles into Instapaper—a crucial part of the process—is straightforward. On mobile you can pass web links into the app through the standard share tools, while on desktop you can either paste the URLs straight into Instapaper, or use the extensions that are available for the most popular browsers.
