My tech-savvy solution for (not) reading on the web
If you are anything like I was, you have at this moment 17 tabs open with articles that you are waiting to read. If these words are passing through your brain at the moment, it’s highly likely I jumped the gun on those other 17 — suckers!
I love my online / offline reading setup. As a bonus, it keeps me away from Facebook and Twitter. As a second bonus, and don’t tell anyone, but I also manage to avoid most pay walls (without doing anything unseemly).
Ingredients
All of this stuff is free, except for the Kindle.
- A Kindle (probably any kind will work, though I have a Paperwhite). You can get them used for quite cheap.
- Pocket to Kindle
- Nuzzle (optional)
- Reader View (optional — Firefox). For Chrome (though I haven’t used it).
Here’s what you do
Step one: buy a Kindle. Set it up, connect it to wifi. Start loving on it. Bonus info for how I get my reading material below.
Pocket is a great little service that saves articles on the web into an online repository for you. It’s a lot like Pinterest, but for readers, not photo stuff.
Step two: Install Pocket’s browser extension (Chrome), then go through your 17 tabs and save them all in Pocket. Now close all those tabs — you can recover your browser!
Step three: Pop over to Pocket to Kindle and sign up to transfer your Pocket articles to your Kindle.
My delivery settings are on the left. The idea here is that when you have three articles you have saved, P2K will gather them up, pack them in a Kindle “book” and send them to your Kindle. It will then delete (archive) those articles from your Pocket in order to send you fresh ones the next time you rack up three. Don’t worry — all 17 articles will eventually make it to your Kindle, it will just take a few days to cycle through your backlog.
Step four: continue enjoying the vast resources of the internet without having to read on a screen. Any time you come across an article you want to read online, you can just click the little “Save to Pocket” button in your browser and end up reading that article on your Kindle the next day or whenever you feel like it.
Pay walls
Many of the best news organizations have (rightly) started charging for their online content. Medium itself often shows me articles I don’t have the right to read (you can see three “premium” articles for free every month, then are supposed to pay). For whatever reason, though, Pocket and P2K frequently bypass those requirements and send you the full article. This works on Medium, for example, but not the New York Times (you just get a little article stub). Your favorite media sources may or may not be tech-savvy enough to prevent you reading the full article through this stack.
If you do pay for your media and for whatever reason aren’t logged in everywhere, or the login process is so onerous as to prevent you from reading their material (*raises hand*), you can feel totally great about this hack. Otherwise, your scruples may vary.
Optional but awesome additional recommendations
The above is all you need to get the words on the internet off your computer and onto your Kindle for more enjoyable reading. I’ve got two more (free) resources that further transform your online life.
Reader view extensions.
I do most of my online browsing in Firefox and their reader view extension is great. I don’t know much about the Chrome one. If you’re trying to find recipes or doing research or pretty much anything, this is so handy. Click the little icon in your browser and instantly all of the ads and auto-play videos (*shudder*) are gone and what you have is plain old text and the images related to the article.
Not directly related to this setup, but if you, like me, read the first couple paragraphs of a thing to see if you really want to dive in, this is a great way to avoid the insane annoyance of the web.
Nuzzle.
After the 2016 election, I knew I needed to get off Facebook. But like so many, I was getting most of my news from that torrid source of vitrol and fearmongering (like a dope, yes). Similar for Twitter. I still wanted to be informed but avoid the banter.
Nuzzle does exactly that — aggregating the articles people I follow are posting on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. (you have to connect each one). I stay up to date without having to go into Facebook. And then… if you see an article you like, you “share” it with Pocket. And it ends up in the same flow as everything else you send to Pocket.
This is where I get most of my reading material — the intelligent people of Twitter and such post links, Nuzzle aggregates them, and in a couple clicks I’ve delivered them to my Kindle for reading at my leisure. I don’t even have to get past the headline with Nuzzle — if something piques my interest I can send it over to the Kindle and decide later that it’s not worth reading.
Bonus tip for the Kindle
I’ve had a Kindle for probably a solid decade at this point. I honestly love the hell out of my Kindle and will go to the mat vs. any other reader. The integration I’ve explained above is worth it alone, IMO. I never read anything online anymore and I loooooove it.
But what about the rest of your reading? If you are an American or a Swede (and probably lots and lots of other countries — those are just the ones I know), you likely have access to Overdrive through your library. There you will find untold numbers of Kindle books waiting to be checked out and delivered to your little computer / bookshelf.
Some Overdrive hacks
- If share your Overdrive account with someone else, you can both read the checked-out books on your respective Kindles.
- If your book is about to expire and you aren’t done, throw your Kindle into airplane mode. The Kindle won’t get the message to “return” the book until it has wifi again, and you can finish the book at your leisure.
And that, my friends, is my online reading hackery. Happy to answer any questions if you’re intrigued but can’t quite figure it all out.
