Read Later Services and Paywalled Sites

< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >

Posted by Luhmann
Oct 21, 2020 at 10:09 AM

There are a growing number of read later services these days, but almost none of them allow for offline storage of paywalled articles. Only Instapaper and Pocket seem to do this, each in a different way: Pocket lets you enter your own registration credentials for a limited number of sites. Instapaper is the best, capturing what you see in your own browser, so it works with any site you have access to, or even paywalled sites that allow a limited number of article views per month if you haven’t met your limit. As far as I know, none of the other services out there can do this.

Here are some of the other services I know of:

- Apple Safari (mac/iOS) has a built-in read later service
- Reeder 5 RSS reader (mac/iOS) now has a service
- GoodLinks is a dedicated (mac/iOS) read later app
- pinboard.in has a read/unread function
- micro.blog now has a read later function as well
- emailthis.me uses your email inbox as a read later service

Some people use DevonThink or Evernote to save PDFs of articles as a read later service, unlike the other options listed here, other than Instapaper and Pocket, this also can work to save paywalled sites for offline reading, but I find using PDF less than ideal, especially on my phone.

Another big difference between these apps is how they handle highlights. Only Instapaper, as far as I know, lets you export all the highlights from a single article to a text file. Pocket and micro.blog allow sharing of individual highlights to social media, but this is useless for scholarship/research. The others don’t offer highlights (although the two PDF options obviously allow standard PDF annotation tools, including highlights).

Posted by JDS
Oct 24, 2020 at 02:15 PM

I have found emailthis seems to work behind paywalls. It is slightly more unorthodox than pocket etc, but it works for me

https://www.emailthis.me/

Posted by Donovan
Oct 25, 2020 at 03:57 AM

Instapaper is the best for these sites. I run into problems sometimes, but it’s pretty rare. I also like outline.com

Posted by Luhmann
Oct 25, 2020 at 04:20 AM

As they state on their website, if a site is behind a paywall they just send you a link, not the actual article.

JDS wrote:
I have found emailthis seems to work behind paywalls. It is slightly
>more unorthodox than pocket etc, but it works for me
> >https://www.emailthis.me/

Posted by Mirce
Oct 25, 2020 at 08:10 AM

If you are not strictly searching for a SERViCE,but only want to have offline access to the full article, you could try SingleFile addon for Chrome/Firefox (i just posted something about this on the forum here).
SingleFile saves the whole web page including all the resources into a single html file which can be sent and read on another device in offline mode. The Windows Chrome version also allows you to clean up (i.e. ads) and annotate the article before saving.
For Android, you can use the version of the addon for Firefox (not sure if it is ported for the latest version of Firefox - Mozilla HAD to break things or they would have lost their sense of identity).
On Android, i found that the best browser for opening the local html files is Opera.
On iOS I believe that iCab browser could open them.

Unfortunately, SingleFile does not provide a way to extract the annotations into something else.

Bonus tipp: for paywalled sites which allow only a limited number of articles to read, add a “.” (dot) after the “.com” in the adress-bar. And enjoy the magic….

Back to topic list