One of my favorite things about my Kobo is its Pocket integration,1 which lets me save reading items from the web with a click and then read them at my leisure in the far-less distracting context of an ereader.
Like many (perhaps most?) people who use read-it-later services like Instapaper, Pocket, and so on, I save far more articles than I read. In my case: literal thousands. My Kobo displays nine items per page. I have hundreds of pages of articles saved and unread (once read, I archive them). This state annoys some people, I gather, as much as an over-full email inbox (read: has more than zero messages in it at the end of the day) annoys me. Not so with the article list, though.
Every so often, I click into the middle of my list and look at what I have saved there. A lot of times, it is indeed no longer interesting, and if so I simply remove it. Maybe it was something particularly timely, or perhaps my interests have simply moved on. An item I found interesting at some point may or may not be interesting in the future. That is fine!
Other times, though — often, in fact! — , I see something that is still interesting. This very post brought to you by my having come back across Michael Allen’s Toward Theological Theology: Tracing the Methodological Principles of John Webster in Themelios — an item I saved sometime in 2020, as far as I can tell, during my blitz slow-but-steady walk through Webster’s oeuvre. Yesterday evening before I fell asleep I started in on it, and then I finished it this afternoon. I am so glad I did not have some kind of auto-cleanup!2
Having a big backlog can be a good thing.
Notes
I am actually pretty annoyed by Pocket itself. Ever since the Mozilla acquisition, the experience of using it has steadily degraded. Why do I need a Mozilla account? (Not why does Mozilla want that; what does it do for me?) Why are my “Saves” not the top feature and “Pocket-Worthy Reads” dominate the home page instead? (Remember that ”save it to read later” is the whole reason Pocket came into existence and why I started using it and why Kobo has an integration with it.) Why is saving an article no longer a top-level feature on the home page and instead hidden behind a button that only appears on the Saves page? The answer, in every case, seems to be “Mozilla was unhappy with how well Pocket ‘engaged’ and ‘monetized’.” Well, maybe so, but they stopped getting my money as a result. If Kobo supported something else, I would switch in a heartbeat. ↩︎
I would not mind, though, if I could easily get a digest once a week of a configurable number of articles and quickly flip through them: keep, discard, discard, discard, keep, discard, keep, keep… ↩︎