This post should only be interesting to you if you’re one of those people who reads things on the Internet.
Instapaper is one of those “neat” web services that I signed up for once-upon-a-time and quickly discovered I didn’t really have a good use for. “Yay, I can save things from the web to read later!” I thought, and then quickly realized thats what bookmarks and todo lists were for.
Then this Christmas my awesome girlfriend surprised me with an Amazon Kindle. I love it. It’s lightweight, gets incredible battery life, and is as easy to read as a paperback book, plus I love being able to buy books on the go. But I still found myself stuck in front of my computer too much, catching up on my backlog of blog posts, news stories, and other articles that are too much commitment to finish reading within a feedreader.
This continued until I found out about Instapaper’s updated support for the Kindle. It’s so simple it’s almost magical. I tag a couple of blog posts and news articles using Instapaper’s bookmarklet, and if I don’t get around to reading them on their site or with the iPhone app, they’re automatically emailed to my Kindle once per week. The format of the converted articles works great with the Kindle, and is complete with images, section headings, and links back to the original articles.
Of course Amazon does charge for the data transfer of the converted document, but it’s quite inexpensive. My last Instapaper update, which weighed in at probably 15 articles and about 500kb, only cost me $0.15.
What you’re saying