Kobo and Instapaper

Last night I was sitting reading a book on my Kobo Libra H2O, when notification of an update for the eReader popped up. Earlier this year Pocket, the read later service, announced that it was being discontinued. Pocket was integrated with Kobo devices so that web pages could be read later on Kobo. Although I am not a heavy user of read later tools - I tend to collect rather than read - I did appreciate being able to keep a handful of articles so that I could read them at the end of the day through my Kobo screen rather than on my Apple devices.

With Pockets ending, Instapaper stepped in to fill the gap. Over the last couple of months I have been waiting for the update to come to my Libra H2O. Last night was that time.

With the update installed I went back to my Instapaper account, one of the first services from my memory to offer a read later service, to reopen it. This was something that I have not done for a very long time. I had almost 200 articles sitting in my account going back 10 to 15 years - see, just as I said, more of a collector than reader! While some looked interesting, I decided to delete them all and start afresh. If I have not missed them in the last decade, I figured that I can live without them. There is always something else to read. Hopefully I didn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I have since uploaded one article, in part to test how the integration with Kobo worked - in a word, seamlessly.

I have installed the Instapaper app on my phone so that I can install the Safari extension to save articles easily. I then removed it from my Home screen. I only want to read articles on my Kobo. I have similarly installed the app on my MacBook Air for access to the Safari extension.

I will probably build up a small collection of articles to read, but intend to either keep up with the reading, or be disciplined in my pruning of articles that are not read in a timely manner. I am pleased though that this transition has been completed of integrating Instapaper with Kobo devices.