10 Apps & Sites That Bring Back the Joy of Reading

5. Read It Later

A direct competitor of Readability and Instapaper, Read It Later is a San Francisco-based startup founded by Nate Weiner that provides a variety of tools for saving articles you find on the Web and reading them later, on almost any device. You put articles into your queue by clicking on a browser bookmarklet, or by selecting the Read It Later function built into Flipboard, Zite, and more than 250 other apps. You access your queue using the browser version of Read It Later or the native Read It Later apps for the iPhone and iPad, Amazon’s Kindle Fire, or Android smartphones and tablets.

That’s the whole story. Because it offers native apps for so many devices, Read It Later is unquestionably the most full-service of all the minimalist reading apps. So the choice between Readability, Instapaper, and Read It Later comes down to which devices and services you use most, as well as your design preferences. I’d say Readability is the most elegant of the three systems, Instapaper is the most geek-friendly, and Read It Later is somewhere in between. As far as I know, Read It Later is the only player in this niche that has collected a substantial amount of venture funding—$2.5 million from Founder Collective, Foundation Capital, Baseline Ventures, and Google Ventures.

[Update 5/25/12: In April 2012, Read It Later rebranded itself as Pocket and released a redesigned app that’s much more visually snazzy. See my interview with Nate Weiner.]

Next app: Reader and Reading List in Safari.