Instapaper, or how to read stuff later
I recently came across a service on the great web called Instapaper. It solves the ancient internet problem of wanting to read long articles when one just haven’t got the time. Everyone has probably thought:
I’ll just save it and read it later…
It’s not easy to manage all these links and texts without any kind of system. This is where Instapaper comes in.
Instapaper is best used from a bookmarklet in your browser. It can be used both on a computer and a mobile platform such as an iPhone. It could look something like this:
It’s very easy to add a site to the reading list. Just navigate to the page, click on the Read Later bookmarklet and boom! To view the reading list and to actually read the articles, there is of course a website which looks something like the following. It has an archive for read items, and it has the ability to extract just the essential text from the websites.
I find the site best used as the Home Page of the browser. This way you see the reading list as a reminder everytime a new browser window is started.
If you have an iPhone, you will get a bonus! There is an app in the App Store which syncs with Instapaper on the web and makes it easy to manage and read items in the list.
The Instapaper iPhone app website has more information on how to use it.
[Instapaper] [iPhone App]
iPhone app: Stanza
The time has come for an e-book reader to find its way to my iPhone. It’s called Stanza and has a built-in online library which contains lots of free books and magazines.
The main library can be sorted by titles, authors and subjects. It also remembers the latest opened books. When viewing a book list, they are shown in a list with the book cover.
The coolest feature with Stanza is the ability to directly download thousands of books from free online libraries. The libraries can be sorted in different ways and of course searched as well. The easiest way to find something interesting to read is perhaps the Most popular section which shows lots of well-known titles.
There is also an online section for news papers. It contains popular magazines such as Wired, the Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine. Using Stanza for reading news seems somewhat strange, since all articles are formatted like a traditional news paper, which makes it difficult to navigate around the contents properly.
So how about the most important view — to actually read the downloaded books? I found that the default view of black text on white background was too bright and uncomfortable for the eyes. After some tweaking, I found that black text on light gray was just the thing.
I read the book When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth by Cory Doctorow, and it was surprisingly easy to read on the small iPhone screen, as long as it is tilted to the side. Now there is no excuse at all to not be reading at least one book a month!
Oh, and Stanza a free download from the App Store.