Disintegrated reading

Instapaper has been a life saver for me. ¹ It offers me several pleasures. I don't have to wade through horrible, garish web pages to get to words I am interested in. There is almost always something to read on my phone in the event of an emergency. It stores what I've saved and makes it easy to annotate and share.

As I say, a life saver.

There are a couple of problems, though. With me, not Instapaper. Over the past year I've had to read three or four books that were only available to me as PDFs. If there's a way to save those to Instapaper, I haven't found it yet. Instead, after jumping through various hoops, I tried both iBooks and the Kindle app on my phone, and both were a total bust. Reading on a laptop or a desktop doesn't cut it either. So I borrowed The Main Squeeze's Kindle, and enjoyed it so much I got one of my own.

And then I learned that I could have my Instapaper feed show up on my Kindle. Well, that's cool. The reading experience on the Kindle is so much better than on the phone, so off I went, hooked it all up, and started to enjoy myself immensely. After about two weeks, though, I've decide to separate the two again, even though I really prefer reading on the Kindle to reading on the phone. Why? Because the Kindle does not sync back to Instapaper, so my phone goes out of sync, and worse, because I don't seem to be able to find any way to get my notes and highlights out of the Kindle.

One reason I love e-reading is the ease of making notes and highlights, but while Instapaper makes it a breeze to find and share them, on the Kindle I find it impossible. I did look into clippings.io but while it may be a great thing for getting notes and highlights out of the Kindle, it doesn't seem to be all that useful for getting them into Instapaper, and that's where I really want them. As of today, I'm disconnecting the two. The Kindle will be for real books, mostly non-illustrated, and the computers -- desktop, laptop and pocket -- will be for Instapaper.