HackMake

If you’ve been following Hack/Make for a bit, you may have noticed that I’ve been doing a slow but thorough migration to services and platforms that give me more control over my digital life. I made an exodus from Google products, and have been switching to things I trust. One thing that is really important to me but felt was a broken system was the way I saved links and articles I wanted to read later. I’ve been a long time Instapaper user and have loved it a lot. It has a great reading experience and is very reliable. Once you’ve read something in Instapaper and stuff it in the archive, that article kind of disappears. That’s a good thing for many people and I considered it a feature for years.

But now I’m thinking more about how what I read online is a part of who I am and that the archive of those articles are like a well-used bookshelf full of the favorite things I’ve read. I wanted more access to that archive. Pinboard made those articles more accessible but the flow between Instapaper for reading and Pinboard for archival was awkward.

So I built Paperback.

Paperback is a clean and simple way to read Pinboard articles later. It uses the Pinboard API to sync saved posts marked “to read” and formats them without ads, ugly fonts, or any of that cruft. It’s a responsive web app with a simple experience on both desktop and mobile. Paperback costs $15 a year. It’s unapologetically a paid service which allows me to make it a sustainable service you can trust.

You can read more about Paperback on the blog and at /about.