As someone who doesn’t really enjoy reading on a computer or laptop screen, I’ve always thought that the Kindle and/or iPad would fill that gap. Over the last year or so I’ve tried different methods of getting the stuff that I find and want to read over on to the Kindle and iPad. This may not be the perfect solution, but it’s the one that’s working for me at the moment.

The magic lies in using Instapaper to collate the articles I want to read and provide them in a text-only format stripped of all the navigation, sidebars and advertising. To get started simple visit http://www.instapaper.com/ and register with your email address and provide a password. To use it you simply send it the URL of the article you’re reading, and it takes care of the rest. There’s a bookmarklet that you can install as well as it being supported by a shedload of existing applications. I don’t keep my bookmarks bar visible in Safari, so I prefer to use the Instafari extension.

Another excellent source is the Zite App for iPad. With Zite (and when browsing through my feeds) I tend to skim, so I use the Read Later button built in to Zite to push it directly to Instapaper.

I also find a lot of stuff that I want to read through Twitter and my feeds in Google Reader. The iPad/iPhone Twitter app has a Read Later function built into it, but I sometimes use the Mac app or even the Twitter website, neither of which don’t have the Read Later function. So to connect these to Instapaper I use the excellent new web service called If This Then That. What this site does is let you create incredibly powerful triggers into existing web services. They’ve also effectively made my weeks of tinkering with Yahoo Pipes irrelevant. The site is currently invite only, and I’ve already used up all my invites, but if you just request on their site you should get an invite pretty fast. So what I’ve done is used the Star functions of both Twitter and Google Reader as the flag that tells If This Then That to take that article that I starred and push it to Instapaper. The interface on ifttt.com is incredibly simple to use, my current two tasks are below:

So now all the articles I’ve saved from Safari, Zite, Twitter and Google Reader are pushed either natively from the app or through ifttt.com through to Instapaper. The last step is now to get all of those articles onto the Kindle or iPad. There is an Instapaper app that you can buy ($4.99) but I ended up never using it. For the actual reading I prefer to visit the Instapaper site and download the format for Kindle and iPad. For Kindle, you can have Instapaper automatically send the articles you save through wireless delivery, but Amazon will charge a delivery fee. I prefer to simply download the Kindle .mobi format file and transfer it across over USB. For the iPad I just visit the Instapaper website in Safari and select the ePub download format.

When prompted choose Open in iBooks (assuming you have it installed) and you’ll be good to go.

The mobi and ePub files have linked contents pages and images get pulled through as well. Enjoy all the articles you collected offline.

If you find Instapaper useful (and how can you not?) please consider subscribing to their service. It’s entirely optional and right now you get nothing extra for doing it, but at $1 per month, it’s not a whole lot to support a great service!