Rakuten Kobo Integration is Live!

We’re excited to share that Instapaper is now live on all Rakuten Kobo eReaders. Now you can log into Instapaper on your Kobo, download your list of articles, and read them on the go.

To celebrate, in partnership with Kobo, we are giving away 15 Kobo Clara Colour eReaders to Instapaper users. You can enter a chance to win a Kobo eReader at instapaper.com/kobo.

About Rakuten Kobo

Rakuten Kobo Inc. is the world’s digital bookseller created by and for booklovers, providing the best dedicated eReaders and apps for reading. Owned by Tokyo-based Rakuten Group, Inc. and headquartered in Toronto, Rakuten Kobo’s millions of worldwide users can read anytime, anywhere, and on any device. With a mission to make reading lives better for all, Rakuten Kobo connects readers to stories using thoughtful and personalized curation of eBooks and audiobooks. With the singular focus of making reading lives the best they can be, Kobo’s open platform allows people to fit reading into more moments in their busy lives. To learn more about Rakuten Kobo, visit www.kobo.com.

Features

The Kobo integration supports the following features:

• Sync your articles with your Instapaper account.
• Access articles offline.
• Like, archive, and delete articles.
• Save articles to your Instapaper account.

You can sign in to Instapaper on your Kobo by navigating to More > My Articles.

We know many of you have been asking for an Instapaper integration on Kobo for many years, and we’re excited to launch this integration. As always, if you have any questions, concerns, or requests, you can reach us at [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you!

– Instapaper Team

PDF Support, Localization, and International Pricing

We’re excited to (finally) launch PDF support for Instapaper! Our focus for PDFs is to make them more readable, especially on mobile devices, and bring the suite of Instapaper tools to PDFs including highlighting, notes, text-to-speech, etc.

For years, we’ve been at work building a PDF Parser that is up to our standards for great reading experiences. We’ve really enjoyed reading PDFs on Instapaper, and have received really positive feedback from beta testers.

Given PDFs require additional processing, PDF support will only be available for Instapaper Premium customers.

Saving PDFs to Instapaper

We have expanded most of our existing “save” methods to support PDFs. You can save PDFs to Instapaper using any of the following methods:

• Use one of our browser extensions to save a PDF from a link on the web.
• Drag & drop a PDF (or several PDFs) to instapaper.com in order to save.
• Upload PDFs from iOS, macOS, or Android using new share extensions.
• Attach a PDF to an email and send to your Save to Instapaper email address.

Localizations

Historically, Instapaper has supported 13 localizations other than English: Dutch, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Chinese Simplified, and Chinese Traditional.

Our iOS app had only 65% of strings translated, and Android had only 70% of strings translated.

We’ve onboarded a new localization vendor, and we’ve brought those translations up to 99% across iOS and Android. Additionally, we’re working to localize and translate the core app flows on instapaper.com.

International Pricing

We’re significantly reducing international pricing in certain markets for Instapaper Premium.

When we first launched Instapaper Premium in 2014, we set international pricing automatically on the App Store and Google Play based on the USD price and 2014 conversion rates.

In 2024, when we increased the price of Instapaper Premium, we updated the USD price point and used the 2024 conversion rate, which significantly increased the price of Instapaper Premium in some international markets.

That was a mistake. We didn’t appropriately predict how the price change would impact each locale and we apologize.

In order to make things right, we are significantly reducing the price of Instapaper Premium on the App Store and Google Play in the following countries:

The new prices will go into effect Thursday August 7th on both iOS App Store and Google Play. On iOS App Store, existing Premium subscriptions will renew at the new price points. On Google Play, new price points are only in effect for new subscriptions, and you can cancel/resubscribe to get the lower rates.

Our goal with Instapaper is to build a long-term, sustainable business that brings the best reading tools to everyone at an affordable price point. The prices above more accurately reflect that intent, and we’re happy to rectify this mistake.

As always, our work is informed by your feature requests and bug reports. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected] if you have any feedback!

– Instapaper Team

Instapaper Rakuten Kobo Integration

We’re excited to announce a new integration that will bring Instapaper to all Rakuten Kobo eReaders. The integration will provide Kobo readers with a seamless way to save and read web articles directly on their Kobo eReaders.

In close partnership with Kobo, we’re working diligently on the integration, and we’re aiming to launch at the end of this summer. The new Kobo Instapaper integration will replace Kobo’s previous integration with Pocket which shut down earlier this month.

Since the Pocket shutdown, our top priority has been to help Pocket users migrate to Instapaper. Pocket users who have made the switch praise Instapaper on its clean, distraction-free reading experience, and robust organization tools.

We’re excited to be partnered closely with Rakuten Kobo to power the read-it-later functionality on their Kobo eReader devices!

Importing from Pocket

If you’re a former Pocket user, you can import your articles into Instapaper in 2-clicks at instapaper.com/pocket.

Alternatively, you can download your Pocket export file and import to Instapaper Settings.

As always, if you have any questions, concerns, or requests, you can reach us at [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you!

– Instapaper Team

PDF Beta, TTS Fixes on iOS, and Logged-In Sites on Android

Today, we’re launching a few updates to Instapaper including a public beta for PDFs, text-to-speech fixes on iOS, and support for Logged-In Sites on Android.

PDF Beta

For years, we’ve been at work building a PDF Parser that is up to our standards for great reading experiences. Now that we’re closing in on a PDF Parser that focuses on delivering the best reading experience for PDFs, especially on mobile devices, we’re ready to onboard beta testers so we can continue refining the experience.

If you’re interested in joining the PDF Beta, please send an email to [email protected] from your Instapaper login email (or include it in the email). We’re going to add the first 100 people that reach out to the beta, and we’ll send you the instructions to get started in a reply.

We’re really excited about our new PDF Parser. It’s one of the biggest leaps we’ve made with Instapaper recently, and we look forward to hearing your feedback!

iOS 9.2: Text-to-Speech Fixes

We rewrote Instapaper’s text-to-speech integration to fix some longstanding issues where the voice skipped or restarted, especially on larger articles. In our testing, this resolved issues across many of the provided voices on iOS, and we’ve received a lot of positive feedback from testers.

We’re working on more improvements to Text-to-Speech on Instapaper, including fixing issues with wireless CarPlay, adding more text-to-speech voices, and re-writing the interface for text-to-speech. If you’re interested in helping to beta test any of those, please reach out to [email protected] and we’ll let you know when it’s ready!

Android 6.2: Logged-In Sites Support

On Instapaper Android, you can now sign in to websites directly within the app. When you’re logged into sites, Instapaper can more reliably retrieve and display complete articles, especially for websites with paywalls. You can learn more on the Logged-In Sites Launch Post.

To get started, navigate to Settings > Logged-In Sites > Navigate to website > Login with your credentials > Tap “Save Login”.

As always, our work is informed by your feature requests and bug reports. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected] if you have any feedback!

– Instapaper Team

Instapaper 9.1: Logged-In Sites, Paywall Detection, and Settings Redesign

Today, we’re launching Instapaper 9.1 for iOS and macOS, which includes support for Logged-In Sites, Paywall Detection, Settings Redesign, and more.

Logged-In Sites

On Instapaper iOS and macOS, you can now sign in to websites directly within the app. When you’re logged into sites, Instapaper can more reliably retrieve and display complete articles.

Increasingly, we’re seeing more “hard paywalls” across the Internet, where publishers are preventing third parties from accessing content. Sometimes, this results in Instapaper only receiving part of an article and, other times, Instapaper is completely blocked from accessing any information including basic metadata (i.e. title, author, image thumbnail, etc.).

We support publishers in serving their content however they’d like. That said, paid subscribers of those publishers should be able to access that content in whichever browsers, apps, or user-agents they’d like. 

To get started, navigate to Settings > Logged-In Sites > Navigate to website > Login with your credentials > Tap “Save Login”.

As a reminder, you can long press an article in the list to redownload it, or save new articles to get the full content.

Paywall Detection

Our article parsers now detect paywalls and provide instructions for accessing the complete content when you have a subscription.

On iOS and macOS, you can use Logged-In Sites in order to access the paywalled content, and we prompt you to login to the website directly from the paywall notice.

On Instapaper.com, the best way to access the full content for a paywalled site is to open the article, ensure you’re logged in to the website, and use one of our browser extensions to save the article.

Settings Redesign

We re-wrote Settings on iOS and macOS to conform to the app theme, improve the organization of Settings pages, and make it easier for our team to add and manage Settings.

We also added three new settings in Settings > Behavior to customize Instapaper further:

1. Save Delay: Adjusts the amount of time that the Save screen shows. You can set this to “None” to have it disappear as quickly as possible.
2. Auto-Lock: Prevents your screen from locking in reader when disabled.
3. Line Breaks in Code: Prevents line breaks in code blocks when disabled.

Other Improvements

We’re also launching a number of other fixes and improvements, including…

• Fixed issue where article information was not showing on lock screen when using text-to-speech Playlists.
• Improved Full Screen Image Viewer on all platforms, but big improvements to iPad and macOS.
• Improvements to device rotation on iPad, and reduced crashing.
• Other minor fixes and improvements.

We’re in the process of building Logged-In Sites support on Android, if you’d like to help beta test please drop us an email at [email protected]

As always, our roadmap is informed by your feature requests and bug reports. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to [email protected] with any requests, questions, or concerns.

– Instapaper Team

Instapaper Android 6.1: View Notes, Multiselect Tagging, and More!

Happy new year! Today we’re excited to launch Instapaper Android 6.1, which includes View Notes to make it easy to view an article’s notes in one place, multiselect tagging for better bulk organizing of your articles with tags, and a few more features and improvements.

View Notes

Easily view your highlights and notes on an article by tapping the Notes button in the article list, or by opening an article, tapping the more button, and tap “View Notes”.

From there, you can easily export your notes on an article in plain text, markdown, or HTML. Additionally, you can easily navigate to each note within the article.

Multiselect Tagging

We added multiselect tagging in Instapaper Android 6.1 to make it much easier to organize your articles with tags in bulk. You can start multiselect by long pressing an article, select the articles you want to add tags to, and then tap the tag icon.

Other Features & Improvements

In addition to the above, Instapaper Android 6.1 has a handful of additional features and improvements:

• Added OpenDyslexic font for readers with dyslexia.
• Improved experience for e-ink readers by disabling more animations.
• Fixed bug where screen would not lock with reader open.
• Fixed issue where video thumbnails would show up duplicated.
• Other minor crash fixes and improvements.

We’re excited to continue improving the Android app, and getting it up to parity with iOS and web. Please let us know if you have any feature requests, bug reports, or improvements you’d like to see on Android!

– Instapaper Team

Introducing Tags for Better Organization

We’re excited to announce that Tags are now live on all platforms—iOS, macOS, Android, Web, and Browser Extensions!

Tags offer more flexibility than folders when it comes to organizing your articles. With tags, you can assign multiple labels to a single article, making it easier to find exactly what you’re looking for later. Additionally, archived articles retain their tags, keeping everything organized long-term.

Both Folders and Tags will continue to be supported in Instapaper. We’ve already seen beta testers reorganize folders into top-level topics and use tags to organize within folders.

To make the migration to tags easy, we’ve added a feature to convert your folders into tags. Just go to instapaper.com, navigate to the folder, select Edit, and click Convert to Tag.

Tags are completely free to use!  If you’d like to support Instapaper and unlock additional features, consider subscribing to Instapaper Premium.

Saving Improvements

On all platforms, Instapaper supports saving articles with tags, organizing into folders, or moving saved articles directly to archive.

Tag Search

With Instapaper Premium, you can now search your articles by tags using the # symbol (e.g. #science will filter articles with the science tag). You can also search articles using multiple tags (e.g. #science #physics), and use full-text search terms alongside your tag filters (e.g. gravity #science #physics).

Importing Tags from other Services

When you import tagged articles from another service, Instapaper will automatically import those tags and add them to your articles.

Through the end of November, we’re offering a 2-month free trial for Instapaper Premium when you import from another service at instapaper.com/user.

Additional Features

This round of updates also includes the following features:

• From an article list, view your Notes on any article with one tap.
• Multi-select tagging is supported on iOS and web, making bulk organization easier. Android support coming soon!
• Export your tagged articles via RSS, PDF, or ePub on instapaper.com. Navigate to the tag > Tap your username on top right > Download.
• IFTTT channel updates include a new trigger when a tag is added to an article, and an improved save action that can save an article with multiple tags.
• Obsidian plugin syncs article tags on imported highlights and notes.

One More Thing: Multicolumn Support on iPad

Multi-column support is being piloted in Instapaper 9 for iOS. Multicolumn layout is a great way to take advantage of the entire screen for reading on your iPad. You can enable it by navigating to text settings > Swipe Left > Multi-column (ON).

The team has been using it and really enjoying it! Based on feedback, we will explore launching it on Android tablet and instapaper.com.

Next Up

Over the next weeks & months, we’ll be focused on more core improvements to Instapaper, including…

• Parsing improvements, including for paywalled content.
• Advanced text-to-speech voices.
• Support for more types of content within Instapaper.

As always, our work is informed by your feature requests and feedback. Please drop us a message at [email protected] with any feedback, or if you’re interested in beta testing the features above.

– Instapaper Team

Bringing Highlights to the Open Web

Today we’re launching updates to our extensions for Chrome (including Arc/Edge), Firefox, and Safari. These updates bring support for highlights on the open web, archiving articles after saving, and Send to Kindle.

Highlights

With the updated Instapaper browser extensions, you can easily create highlights on any web page in a few different ways:

• Select text and save the article.
• After saving an article, any time you select text a small popover will appear with buttons to create a highlight or note.
• After saving an article, you can create a Quick Highlight by holding Alt or Option and selecting text.

Your highlights will only be available on the page during that session, are not stored locally in the browser, and will not appear on a refresh. However, when you press the Instapaper button again it will bring all of your highlights back onto the page.

With these updates, pressing the Instapaper button is not only for saving the article, but bringing your highlights, notes, and Instapaper tools directly to the webpage itself.

We built these features to be discreet, however, you can also disable each feature in the extension settings:

• Chrome: Right-click Instapaper extension > Options.
• Firefox: Right-click Instapaper add-on > Manage Extension > Preferences.
• Safari: Instapaper macOS App Settings > Safari Extension.

Archive after Save

We received many feature requests for archiving immediately after saving. We’ve added an archive button to the toolbar that makes it easy to quickly archive after saving.

Send to Kindle

With this update, we’re also bringing support for Send to Kindle directly in the browser extensions. It’s available for Instapaper Premium customers that have a Kindle email address configured in Instapaper Settings.

We recommend migrating Send to Kindle to the browser extensions, however, we will continue to maintain support for the Send to Kindle bookmarklet as well.

Send to Kindle can also be disabled in the extension options page.

Firefox Add-On

Earlier this year, Instapaper was removed from the Firefox Add-On store after attempting a small update to fix saving YouTube videos. After being removed and several subsequent rejections, we decided to self-distribute our Firefox Add-On.

We’re happy to share that we were able to work with Mozilla to resolve the issue, and Instapaper is now available on the Firefox Add-On store again. That said, given the situation we will be continuing to support the Firefox Add-On store and self-distribution of our Add-On.

In either case, your Add-On should automatically update as long as you’re using Firefox version 109 (January 2023) or later.

Safari Extension

For historical reasons, we previously distributed our Safari Extension with the Instapaper Save app. We’re happy to share that the new Safari Extension is now available with the main Instapaper macOS app.

We recommend migrating to the new Safari Settings by doing the following:

• Update Instapaper macOS to version 8.6.2.
• Open Safari Settings > Extensions
• Enable new Instapaper extension (icon with rounded corners).
• Disable old Instapaper Extension (icon with square corners).

Instapaper macOS 8.6.2 also ships with an updated Mac Share Extension that is improved from the Instapaper Save app (e.g. saving from Apple News now works properly).

With this update the Instapaper Save app is now deprecated. We plan to remove it from the App Store in the coming weeks. After you successfully migrate, you can delete the Instapaper Save app from your Mac.

Other Minor Fixes & Improvements

In this release, we’re also shipping a number of other minor fixes and improvements:

• Fix inline Twitter saving on x.com domain.
• Fix for saving Hacker News threads on Firefox.
• Lobste.rs inline saving support.

As always, our roadmap is directly informed by your feature requests and bug reports. Please reach out to us at [email protected].

– Instapaper Team

Summaries, Custom Article Actions, Obsidian Integration, and More

Today we’re launching Instapaper 8.6 for iOS and macOS, which includes Summaries to quickly get a snapshot of an article, Custom Article Actions to customize the toolbar in the article view, and many more new features that you’ve been asking for.

We’re also launching our official Obsidian Plugin, which syncs all of your highlights and notes to Obsidian.

Summaries

Summaries provide both an overview of the current article, and a list of Summary Highlights which showcase the most important sentences in the article.

You can access Summaries by tapping the “…” menu then tapping Summarize. We wanted to make Summaries accessible from wherever you are in the article, so you can also swipe from the right edge of the article to open the summary.

Tapping any of the Summary Highlights will take you to that place in the article, and you can easily highlight or create a note by tapping the summary highlight. There is also a toggle that enables you to show all Summary Highlights in context while you’re reading the article.

Summaries are limited to 5 per month for free users. With Instapaper Premium you’ll get unlimited Summaries, and Instapaper will automatically sync Summary Highlights to your device. If you have the “Show in article” toggle enabled, Instapaper will automatically show the Summary Highlights in the article without needing to fetch the summary first.

Summaries are available in Instapaper 8.6 on iOS, macOS, and on the Instapaper website. Android support coming soon!

If you’re interested in the technical details, we also published a post about how Instapaper Summaries are generated.

Custom Article Actions

In the article view, you can now customize the toolbar actions by long pressing an icon, and replacing it with a customized action. We’ve received a lot of requests from people who frequently use text-to-speech or view their notes, and want an easy way to do that from the toolbar. So if you’re using Instapaper for heavy research, your toolbar might look something like this:

Custom Article Actions are available today on iOS and macOS.

Obsidian Plugin

We’re excited to share our official Obsidian Plugin, which is the only plugin that can sync all of your highlights and notes to Obsidian.

You can enable the plugin by searching for Instapaper in Obsidian Plugins. After installing, navigate to Settings > Instapaper (under Community Plugins), log in with your Instapaper credentials, and your Notes will start syncing.

Additional Features & Improvements

In addition to the above, we’re launching a number of additional features and improvements in Instapaper 8.6:

• Oldest article sync is now available. If you’d like to sync your articles oldest first, you can navigate to Instapaper Settings > Advanced > Home (Under Syncing) > Oldest First.
• Support for iOS default system browser when opening links. You can switch to the iOS default browser by navigating to Instapaper Settings > Browser > System.
• If you prefer Dark Mode slightly less dark, True Black can now be disabled in Instapaper Settings > Advanced > True Black.
• Toggle to enable or disable scrolling under the status bar available in Settings > Advanced > Full Screen.
• Option to remove “via Instapaper” attribution when sharing articles is available with Instapaper Premium in Settings > Advanced > Sharing.
• Improved display of code blocks in reader view.
• Increased largest font sizes for better accessibility.

As always, if you have any feature requests, questions, or concerns please feel free to reach out at [email protected].

– Instapaper Team

Instapaper Android 5.0: Article list redesign, improved reader settings, and many bug fixes

Today we’re launching Instapaper Android 5.0, which completely redesigns the article list view, improves reader settings, reintroduces Send to Kindle, and fixes a number of longstanding issues and bugs with the Android app.

Article List Redesign

In order to bring Android to parity with iOS and web, we’ve redesigned the list to include thumbnail images, and replaced the old dot progress indicator with estimated read times.

On tablet we have included thumbnail images, and also added the option to toggle between grid and list view to more closely match our other tablet experiences.

Please note that previously saved articles will not automatically show thumbnail images. If you’d like all of your articles to show thumbnails, you can redownload all of your articles by navigating to Instapaper Settings > Advanced > Redownload All Articles. We recommend doing this on WiFi and leaving Instapaper open to re-sync.

Improved Reader Settings

We tweaked the default font settings on the reader view for a more pleasant reading experience by default. In particular, we increased the default font sizes and line heights, and customized these for both Android phone and tablet.

Many people have requested to disable pagination animations on Android e-ink readers like Onyx Boox. In this release you can disable pagination animations by navigating to Instapaper Settings > Pagination Options > Pagination Animations (OFF).

We tested on our Onyx Boox, and it’s a big improvement!

Relaunching Send to Kindle

In late ‘23, there was an issue with sharing articles from Instapaper using the Android system share sheet. We fixed that issue, however, in the process it required us to remove Send to Kindle short-term.

With this release, we’re bringing back Send to Kindle for individual articles on Android. Please note Send to Kindle on Android is only available with an Instapaper Premium subscription.

Many Fixes and Improvements

In addition to the above, we’ve also fixed a significant number of bugs:

• Share All Notes now shares your highlights/notes in the order they appear in the article.
• Saving to Instapaper from the share extension saves article description instead of article URL as the description.
• Fixed transparent status bar issue on reader view.
• Improved full screen transitions on reader view.

We’re excited to finally get this release out. It’s a strong foundation on which we’ll continue to improve the Instapaper Android app. 

As always, if you have any feature requests, questions, or concerns please feel free to reach out at [email protected]

– Instapaper Team