Straight from the Instapaper blog:
To ensure Instapaper can continue for the foreseeable future, it’s essential that the product generates enough revenue to cover its costs. In order to do so, we’re relaunching Instapaper Premium today.
As a reminder, Instapaper Premium is a subscription for $2.99/month or $29.99/year that offers the following features:
- Full-text search for all articles in your account
- Unlimited Notes
- Text-to-Speech playlists on mobile
- Speed reading to get through all of your articles up to 3x faster
- An ad-free Instapaper website
- “Send to Kindle” using a bookmarklet or our mobile apps
Instapaper is back!
And that’s not all:
We are very sorry for the extended downtime and, as a token of our apology, we are giving six months of Instapaper Premium to all EU users affected by the outage.
I’m getting off Pocket this instant, and moving back to Instapaper.
Expect to hear more from me about this.
After reading Allen Pike’s piece “372 Easy Steps to Expanding Your Mind” on his experiences with Instapaper, the popular read it later service, I decided to finally give Instapaper a go again. It’s been a good number of years since I used it, and I was immediately presented with this lovely message:
Instapaper is temporarily unavailable for users in Europe
Great.
Luckily, I remembered I have an old Pocket account, and I used to like that, so I’ve now downloaded the app again. To be pretty honest, I don’t notice any difference to the app to when I used to use it. Maybe that’s a win for consistency, but it looks a bit outdated.
After logging in, I noticed there was still four articles that I’d saved for later. It’s a good overview of the articles I usually read. Although I must admit these are from a very long time ago:
I’m pretty sure this type of service, is the missing piece of my reading puzzle. I already use Twitter for “news”, and I’m a big fan of RSS feeds, so I have a lot of content already. Along with that, I can find more content on Micro.blog, which is a great place to write your own content, read others, and find interesting conversations and communities.
However, whenever I have just a single article I want to read, but just not that second, it somehow finds a way to escape me.
It’s not that I’ve been completely without a service like this, instead I’ve been ”using” Pinboard. I’m a big fan of Pinboard, with its simple appearance, great functionality, and good API (I was messing around with automation before). But I haven’t found a great app for it yet, so it doesn’t really get used that much. I tend to just send links there to die.
So I’m going to try out Pocket for a while, I hope I can get around the old design of the iOS app. Luckily for me it has a dark mode, and also a Mac app. I think I’ll be fine.
Find me on Pocket