Apps for Reading on the Web

I read a lot of articles on the web. Unfortunately there are very few sites that are optimised for reading on a browser so I make use of a number of different apps to improve my reading experience.

My favourite go to is Pocket (formerly ReadItLater). With this I bookmark a link to read later and at the end of the day curl up in bed with my iPad. Pocket reformats the articles to remove the noise letting me customise the font size and use of white-space. It is a pleasure to read articles formatted this way.

For reading directly on the web there are a number of plugins & extensions available. My fave is Readability which is very similar to Pocket. In second place is newbie MagicScroll which splits articles into screen-high pages for easy page-down scrolling.

I like that Readability has a link sharing capability so you can share the reformatted page with friends. Plus it has a “send to Kindle” function which I keep wanting to use but alas my iPad is getting much more love than my Kindle.

Readability also has a “read later” function which I have never used because I got invested in Pocket back when Readability was not free. In any case, I find the Pocket landing page for bookmarked articles has a much nicer interface.

Others which I’ve tried and are all not bad include Evernote Clearly, Instapaper, and Reading Glasses for Chrome.

Of that lot, Clearly has one strong advantage over the others which is that by saving articles to Evernote, you have access to a full text search of content. The other services only let you search titles.

Pocket
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Readability

MagicScroll