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Instapaper (analogue edition)

I love Instapaper, except for one small thing. I recently built up a hefty backlog of unread articles, and the prospect of reading them all on a laptop or iPhone screen seemed like more of a chore than a pleasure.

I should really get around to actually reading some of these things that I'm saving to Read Later.

Something had obviously gone wrong. I had personally curated a series of articles, blog posts and essays that I was genuinely interested in, but somehow the resulting collection felt like a to-do list, yet another inbox on my computer waiting to be un-bolded. What I really wanted was a nicer user interface to these articles.

So I copy-and-pasted the text of my unread articles from Instapaper into a PDF, uploaded it to Lulu.com, and ordered a single book. Naturally I thought about scripting all of this but Instapaper doesn’t provide an API to retrieve articles, and I didn’t really want to bother with authentication headers and screen scraping and all of that hackery. I just wanted the book.

Things I Would Rather Read On Paper

I know books are supposed to be old media, but there’s something that feels futuristic about holding this one. It’s imperfect, disposable, personal. I can scribble on it and dog-ear it, and read it lying down. It cost around $10 and arrived in less than a week.

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket

So I’m off to read a book now.

23 comments

  1. Cool idea, how many pages is it?
    Will you bring it to FOWA? :)

    Posted by Thomas Wittek, March 5th, 2009 at 11:09 pm

  2. @Thomas I had it at the office today, but I can bring it in again if you’d like to check out the quality. The pages aren’t numbered, but I’d guess around 250 pages of pretty small type. More photos here and here.

    Posted by emmetc, March 5th, 2009 at 11:33 pm

  3. Great idea! I linked to this from the Instapaper Blog:

    http://blog.instapaper.com/post/83957505

    I’ll make this easier in the future.

    Posted by Marco Arment, March 6th, 2009 at 3:45 am

  4. Great idea. I bought an A5 binder last year with the intention of prining out good articles as I found them so I could take them anywhere and read at my leisure. The process of Copy ‘n pasting, then reformatting to print to a5 size got the better of me though….your method seems much better.

    Posted by lewism, March 6th, 2009 at 12:32 pm

  5. Prior to Instapaper, I regularly pasted the text from articles to read offline into a Word doc. These Word docs (I would create a new one every few days) used a template I created with two columns of text, narrow margins, small font, and the days at the bottom. Printing these double-sided produced a decent chunknof offline rewady material – not 250 pages like your book, but about 6-10 pages, a couple times per week.

    Posted by Doug, March 6th, 2009 at 1:03 pm

  6. business idea, plot thus: people email you a bunch of links to stuff they want to read in book format like you have done. you provide all the legwork in producing, ordering and shipping the book. you add a fee to cover the costs… i’ll take my 20% in magic beans thank you very much.

    Posted by kevin dunne, March 6th, 2009 at 6:34 pm

  7. Interesting how the producers of content get the shaft on this deal.

    Posted by Jay Robinson, March 10th, 2009 at 4:29 am

  8. @Jay Robinson: by “the producers of content”, do you mean the writers? I don’t see how they “get the shaft”. It’s not as if the original poster is selling the book. Admittedly he payed Lulu to have it printed, but that’s not so very different from paying for the paper, toner, and electricity if he had printed it off at home.

    And if he likes the articles he’ll talk about them, post about them, and so on. Everybody wins.

    Posted by Martin McCallion, March 10th, 2009 at 3:35 pm

  9. Did you have to go into each article and cut and paste it into an Indesign file?

    That seems very time consuming. Or did you find a way to take the entirety of the text into your book at once?

    If the former, it seems like it’d be easier just to keep Word open and cut and paste stories into it.

    Posted by Kazys Varnelis, March 11th, 2009 at 11:20 pm

  10. Did you have to cut and paste each document from its site into an Indesign file? That seems to make Instapaper a bottleneck. In that case you’d do better just keeping Word open all the time and cutting and pasting the documents in.

    Or was there some way to get everything into one document?

    Posted by Kazys Varnelis, March 11th, 2009 at 11:24 pm

  11. Is there any way to export Instapaper to PDF or some Sony Reader format? Automated like, that is.

    Posted by Eric, March 12th, 2009 at 9:17 pm

  12. the crowd is turning ugly. better start moderating emmet.

    Posted by kevin dunne, March 14th, 2009 at 5:12 am

  13. Hi Emmet, loved this idea so much (and had so many articles saved up) I did it myself – http://tinyurl.com/dhsarb Actually really pleased with how it came out.

    Posted by Adam Liptrot, March 17th, 2009 at 2:45 pm

  14. Just one question: What’s the environmental impact of doing something like this? Usually I feel slightly better reading on the computer than printing out, even though this might just be irrational (server and computer power can actually be quite environmentally destructive), but for some reason it feels more “right” than printing something out and throwing it away. And how do you feel about reading articles like this on a Kindle or something?
    My reading is always getting way too far ahead of me :/

    Posted by Nina, March 20th, 2009 at 10:02 am

  15. i’d suggest you make the book publicly purchasable.

    and if you sell enough copies, share the proceeds
    (if there are any) with the authors of the articles…

    even if there are no proceeds, make sure that
    the u.r.l. to each blog is mentioned prominently,
    both for attribution, and to send traffic their way.

    print-on-demand is getting _very_ interesting!

    -bowerbird

    Posted by bowerbird, March 23rd, 2009 at 6:20 pm

  16. Thanks for all the comments, folks. As a couple of people have mentioned, I definitely think there is the kernel of a product or service idea here. I was really glad to see that Marco, the developer of Instapaper, wants to make this process simpler from his end. There has also been lots of interesting conversation happening on the web the past week or so about the future of journalism, in particular Steven Johnson’s excellent take, which promotes the role of editors and curators in distilling content.

    As commenters here have also pointed out, there are some things to be careful of here. Copyright or not screwing over the original authors is certainly a concern, although not in a single print run meant for personal consumption, in my opinion. Some revenue-share deal could certainly be an option for someone who wanted to act as a publisher. I hadn’t considered the environmental impact of this until Nina mentioned it.

    All in all, it’s great to see that people were interested in this. I do believe that niche curatorship/editing and personalization are pushing the future of publishing in two slightly different directions, but there’s probably room in that future for both of those approaches to succeed. As it stands, I remain amazed that I can walk into a bricks-and-mortar newsagents that stocks literally thousands of magazines and fail to find a single one that interests me.

    Posted by emmetc, March 23rd, 2009 at 11:15 pm

  17. Some of the above posters ask questions about the procedure by which you made this, and you didn’t address that. Could you please?

    Posted by Dub Snothiue, April 5th, 2009 at 12:48 am

  18. Adam, if Emmet can’t explain that, can you? How easy is this to do?

    Posted by Dub Snothiue, April 5th, 2009 at 12:51 am

  19. Here’s how I made the book

    Firstly, I collected all of the articles that I wanted to read using Instapaper. You don’t have to do this, you could just collect a few articles yourself.

    I needed to copy and paste all of the articles into a PDF or Word document to then upload that to lulu.com, the company that prints the book. I tried using Google Docs but it has a document size limit so I had to look elsewhere. I’m on a Mac so I used NeoOffice to create the document (if you’re on Windows you can use Microsoft Word of OpenOffice). I opened each article in Instapaper (e.g. like this one), copied the text of the article, and pasted it into my NeoOffice document. I didn’t bother spending lots of time on formatting the text — I added a page break between each article and that’s it. The I saved that as a Word document (.doc) file.

    Lulu.com takes care of the rest. On their website you can create a new book, upload your .doc file, and customise your book (I chose the A5 size, which is roughly the same as a regular paperback). That’s it.

    Posted by emmetc, April 5th, 2009 at 10:44 am

  20. Emmet,

    This was a great idea. You inspired me to do the same thing… TWICE! I posted a review and images of the book I just created on Lulu here: http://www.newfangled.com/creating_a_book_on_lulu_dot_com

    -Chris

    Posted by Chris Butler, April 10th, 2009 at 2:26 pm

  21. Cool idea! I had the same problem, but now I use the open source program Calibre to sync my Instapaper once a day and copy it to my Sony Reader PRS-505. Not quite a book, but it’s always up to date. Anyway, if you have an ereader device, it might be a nice solution for you in the future!

    Posted by Chuck Smith, April 10th, 2009 at 6:42 pm

  22. I don’t understand this lulu part. Why not just use a laser printer?

    Posted by none, July 6th, 2009 at 11:39 pm

  23. @none: I guess you could do that too… in fact, that’s the point of Instapaper. I just prefer the form factor of a book, and like I said in the original post there’s something special about reading a book that’s just for me.

    Posted by emmetc, July 7th, 2009 at 11:39 am

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