The problem with read-it-later apps

I read, a lot. Not as much as I want. But enough.

I read while travelling. I read in the breaks I take at work. I read while waiting for something. I read while I'm sitting on the loo. This last one I am not so proud of.

I read different things at different times.

While travelling, I read a book. Other times, I read from one of the few sites I follow regularly. I have a tab group called Read on Safari. At present it has the following tabs open on it:

1. Daring Fireball
2. Scripting News
3. The Verge
4. Seth's Blog
5. Six Colors
6. The Guardian - Mostly for football news
7. YLE - English
8. MacRumors
9. Hacker News

I also have my own website open here. But that is mostly to check that whatever I scheduled for publishing has published.

It feels weird saying I read a lot. What is a lot? I read enough. Is that better? I don't know.

Most of these places I listed above publish things which can be read in one session. Mostly 1-5 minutes. I feel like that's a good length of time for something mostly read on phones.

For longer stuff, I had tried Instapaper and Pocket in the past. But was no longer using. Then in one of the Installers, David talked about how awesome read-later apps were. Omnivore being one of them and the other one being Readwise. At that time I was really tempted to get a Boox Palma, and was looking at apps which would help me read the web on it.

I started using Omnivore around June of this year. And I have done a lot of reading on it. I like the concept of it. But there are two things about it (not Omnivore, read-it-later apps in general) that I do not like.

1. The Inbox Zero problem. I do not like pending things. The articles that I have not read yet. I get that that is the point of these apps. But if you do not read stuff that you saved, it can become a long list of things that you need to get to. That I need to get to. It feels like a chore. It does not feel good. This makes me not want to open the app. Which increases the list of unread articles. You see where this is going?
2. I lose the identity of the people who wrote those articles. Their websites. The fonts they us, etc. Everything is the same. The same inter font. White text on black background. Which is good if the websites are trash. But they aren't. And I miss that in the read-it-later app.

Inbox Zero is something that I guess I could tackle. Maybe just delete everything that is not interesting to read now. I do that, if I don't like something. But, deleting something without opening it feels bad. And so the long list continues.

I have started to feel the second thing recently. I like looking at different websites. I am always looking for things to steal.

Reading something in a read-it-later app feels like stripping character from the piece.

And for that I don't have any solutions.

For now, I have stopped saving to Omnivore. The app is still there. I just open any link that seems interesting in a new tab in the same Read tab group on Safari.