interesting Wired article on Instapaper and the Kindle

[Nate the great]

It’s flawed, but I love my Kindle 2. The reading experience is great, and if I can forget about the DRM I can enjoy any of the books Amazon deigns to sell to foreigners. It is also a fantastic personal newspaper when combined with Instapaper, the excellent web-page clipping service.

We already wrote a guide to de-crippling the Kindle, but a combination of an update to Instapaper (it now offers a Kindle-friendly package of your clipped articles for direct download) and some Automator kung-fu, the process of loading up your e-reader with hand-picked articles is as easy as plugging it in.

First, get yourself an Instapaper account. This is free, and allows you to clip entire web pages to read later by simply clicking a bookmarklet in your browser. The article is then stripped of ads and other junk leaving only beautifully formatted text that can be read on your iPhone or Kindle, or even printed onto (gasp) paper. Once set up, go to your own Instapaper page and you’ll see this:

more here:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/...ic-instapaper/

Has anyone tried it?

[kjk]

I use Instapaper on my iPhone all the time. Great app.

[Mike L]

Yes, I've been using it for months. I have the Instapaper app on my iPod Touch, which means that if I come across an interesing article, I can flag it in my browser, then read it on my Touch, even when I don't have an Internet connection. It's great for collecting snippets to read on the bus, for example.

[jj2me]

Also supports ePub downloads, so not just for Kindle or iPhone/iPod Touch.

I also haven't yet used Instapaper, but plan to. For my Sony Reader I've been using

• Old: Bookit, but it now always fails for me.
• Now: screen scrape to Microsoft Word, raise font two sizes, save as PDF.
• New: Instapaper

For my Palm OS, I've been using Plucker, but maybe Instapaper will replace it--I'm pretty sure Instapaper's Kindle format will be readable by Mobipocket on the Palm.

Thanks for linking the article. Interesting that they manage to auto-load the Kindle with Instapaper content using a Mac. I'll be looking for Windows macro programs that can also do the automation.

[JaneD]

I've been using Instapaper on my DX for a few months, and love it.

[TomF]

Very cool! I've created an account and added the bookmarks. The perfect complement to Calibre and it's newsfeeds.

[Talldog]

I used Instapaper on my DX for a while, and it worked pretty well, but I spent a lot of time just getting my articles clipped and onto my Kindle. Plus, every day I had to individually delete the previous day's articles. I finally decided it wasn't worth the overhead. Now, I just read all that stuff directly on my iPad.

[john7parker]

I would disagree with the last post. The most annoying thing about reading on the web is the glare from the screen. Thats what the Kindle solved for me. I used instapaper but it make me download the AZW file which was almost as much hassle as cutting and pasting it myself. I switch to clipDO.com when I saw then launch on eBookReader.

There are things I would change about it but at least the delivery is instant (or near instant)