It’s not easy keeping up with everything that’s written on the web, especially not if you’ve got a dozen open browser tabs vying for your attention. This is where read-it-later apps come in.
These apps let you siphon off articles you want to get back to later, at a more leisurely pace, when the work of the day is done. You can catch up on your reading in bed, on the subway, over breakfast, or whenever you like.
Sadly, we just lost one of the more capable read-it-later apps: Mozilla is shutting down Pocket as it focuses its efforts on its Firefox browser, and Pocket data will be permanently deleted on October 8. If you’re looking for a new home for your archive of articles, or you’re keen to see what read-it-later apps are capable of doing for the first time, you’ll find our pick for the best options below.
Instapaper
Instapaper offers a clean, calm interface.
Courtesy of David Nield
Instapaper is one of the oldest and most comprehensive read-it-later apps out there, and it does a fine job of turning chaotic webpages into calm, orderly blocks of text that look like they’re displayed on an e-reader. Articles can be added straight from your browser, pasted in manually, or added via email, and there are apps for reading saved articles in the web browser and on your mobile devices.
There are lots of neat little features hidden away in Instapaper, like the ability to organize articles with folders and tags. If you decide you like Instapaper enough, there’s a paid tier too: For $6 a month it adds features including the option to have articles read out to you, a “’speed read”’ mode that displays one word at a time, and the ability to send articles to an Amazon Kindle.
Instapaper (freemium) for web, Android, iOS
Feedly
Use Feedly to track your favorite sites on the web.
Courtesy of David Nield
Feedly can help you keep up with everything being published on your favorite sites, and curate a read-it-later list of articles you want to get back to when you have the time. You get a host of features for sorting the incoming deluge of posts, from filters and keyword searches to folders for organization and a choice of list layouts across your devices.