Yesterday, Instapaper published a glorious announcement:

We’re excited to announce a new integration that will bring Instapaper to all Rakuten Kobo eReaders. The integration will provide Kobo readers with a seamless way to save and read web articles directly on their Kobo eReaders.

There’s a bit more in the post, but that’s the gist of it. I could not be more excited about this. The truth is, I always liked Instapaper better than Pocket, and migrated only grudgingly because the integration with Kobo was so valuable. Now I get the best of both worlds — a wonderful upside to Mozilla’s foolish choice to kill Pocket.

More: Instapaper is an indie company with just a couple folks working on it, and Kobo is very much an underdog in the ereader space (where everyone is an underdog compared to Amazon’s Kindle line). These are relatively small, niche products, and that is good. They are not as likely to get distracted by something “bigger” than their core offerings, nor to neglect these offerings because they are so small compared to other parts of their product. These are the products.

A bonus note here, that will serve as a kind of coda to my comments on Mozilla’s shutdown of Pocket — Instapaper began as an indie product, ended up in the hands of Pinterest, a veritable behemoth, and then went indie again. Mozilla’s public messaging purported that there was no alternative to shutting down Pocket, but Pinterest was in much the same boat all the way back in 2018 and made a wildly different decision. Instead of killing something that was valuable to people, they let it go its own way again. One major result of that choice is that Instapaper is still here, ready to pick up the slack where Pocket left off. A reminder that things actually do not have to go the way they did with Mozilla and Pocket.