Straight from the Instapaper blog:
To ensure Instapaper can continue for the foreseeable future, itās essential that the product generates enough revenue to cover its costs. In order to do so, weāre 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
- āSend to Kindleā using a bookmarklet or our mobile apps
Instapaper is back!
And thatās 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.
Iām getting off Pocket this instant, and moving back to Instapaper.
Expect to hear more from me about this.
After reading Allen Pikeās piece ā372 Easy Steps to Expanding Your Mindā on his experiences with Instapaper, the popular read it later service, I decided to finally give Instapaper a go again. Itās 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 Iāve now downloaded the app again. To be pretty honest, I donāt notice any difference to the app to when I used to use it. Maybe thatās a win for consistency, but it looks a bit outdated.
After logging in, I noticed there was still four articles that Iād saved for later. Itās a good overview of the articles I usually read. Although I must admit these are from a very long time ago:
Iām pretty sure this type of service, is the missing piece of my reading puzzle. I already use Twitter for ānewsā, and Iām 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.
Itās not that Iāve been completely without a service like this, instead Iāve been āusingā Pinboard. Iām a big fan of Pinboard, with its simple appearance, great functionality, and good API (I was messing around with automation before). But I havenāt found a great app for it yet, so it doesnāt really get used that much. I tend to just send links there to die.
So Iām 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 Iāll be fine.
Find me on Pocket
