Often I’ll come across a web­page that I want to read, but it is going to take more time than I have. For exam­ple, it might be an online research paper or a news­pa­per arti­cle, or it could be a lengthy blog arti­cle that you would like to read but you don’t want to sub­scribe to the whole blog. Of course, you could just book­mark the page, but book­mark col­lec­tions tend to grow wild and you might for­get to come back to it.

There is a very neat solu­tion to this prob­lem if you already use Google Reader (or some other feed reader) for online read­ing. Here are the required steps for set­ting it up.

1. Set up an account on Instapa­per. This is a tool for sav­ing web pages for later reading.
2. Go to http://​www​.instapa​per​.com/u and add the RSS feed (link at bot­tom right) to your Google Reader account.
3. Read Later ← Drag this to your Book­marks Bar.

Now every time you want to save some­thing for later read­ing, just click the “Read Later” book­mark. A “Saved!” mes­sage will briefly appear in the cor­ner of the page. The page will be saved to your Instapa­per account, and so will auto­mat­i­cally appear on Google Reader. Assum­ing you are in the habit of check­ing Google Reader every day or two, there’s noth­ing else to remember.

You could read the page within your Instapa­per account, but then you would have to remem­ber to look at one more web­site, and I find it much sim­pler if every­thing I want to read turns up in Google Reader auto­mat­i­cally. Apart from set­ting up the Instapa­per account, you should never need to go back to the Instapa­per web­site again.

It some­times takes an hour or so for a page to turn up in your Google Reader account due to the fre­quency of refresh­ing the feed at Instapa­per. But since you are sav­ing it to read later, that is hardly a problem.

There are other sim­i­lar ser­vices to Instapa­per includ­ing “Read it later”. Pre­sum­ably you could do some­thing sim­i­lar with these other ser­vices, but I haven’t tried them.

Related Posts:

• Using Google Reader
• Fol­low­ing authors on Google Scholar
• Researcher por­tals
• Blog aggre­ga­tors
• iPhone apps for research