I love to read long articles which I gather from websites. Here are some of the tools I use to make the experience more enjoyable:
Instapaper Link Saver/Reader
Instapaper is the best way I’ve found to save links to web articles and quickly pull them up for later leisure reading on my Kindle, iPhone, netbook, or desktop computer; here’s an explanatory video. I keep its “Read Later” bookmarklet on my computers and iPhone to quickly save articles for later reading.
The Instapaper iPhone app is splendid, and you can also send a digest of articles to your Kindle (Amazon charges a small fee for the conversion). But I prefer to access my RSS feed of Instapaper articles on my Kindle and pull each one up that way (establish an account and copy the RSS link from your main page into a Kindle Basic Web bookmark).
Readability Webpage Reformatter
Readability is a great bookmarklet for ridding a website of the clutter; here’s an explanatory video. It reformats a site into a single column of text and pictures in the font and format you select when you create the bookmarklet. I especially like using this tool on my netbook, which has limited screen space.
Of course you need some content on which to use those tools. Here are my most reliable sources of articles:
- Give Me Something to Read – From the maker of Instapaper, this provides several links each week to interesting long-form articles on the web
- longreads on Twitter – just follow or access this Twitter account for links to mostly long-form web articles
- Salon – good book and movie articles of medium length, plus much more on this liberal-slanted site
- The Atlantic – online version of a venerable American magazine with occasional long articles in its magazine section
- The New Yorker – online version of another notable magazine, featuring some of the most lengthy articles, including the fascinating but fallible Malcolm Gladwell
- Vanity Fair – more gossipy than the others, but far better than People and its ilk
- The New Republic – some long articles, with a liberal social, social democratic economic, and hawkish foreign policy slant
- Wired – very nerdy mixture of both short and long articles
- Ars Technica – for computer nerds
Happy reading!
