Using a Kobo Forma eReader to Centralize Books and Read-Later Content
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Using a Kobo Forma eReader to Centralize Books and Read-Later Content
As Club MacStories members and AppStories listeners should know by now, I’ve been on a journey to find the ideal read-later solution for me for several weeks. I tested a variety of apps and services, and I thought I had ultimately landed on saving articles found in Safari as “personal documents” to my Kindle Oasis using a service called Push to Kindle. That approach, which I also detailed on AppStories, allowed me to retain the benefits of using a Kindle device for all kinds of reading: books I want to read are already on my Kindle, so by saving articles from the web to my Kindle library as well, I could continue to take advantage of the device’s fantastic e-ink display and focused reading environment. The system was not ideal since pushing articles to the Kindle forced me to only read them on the Kindle itself, and I couldn’t easily export highlights from articles to other apps, but I loved the idea of unifying reading in one place so much, I could live with the trade-off.
As is often the case with these experiments, a much more compelling and versatile solution was hiding in plain sight, and it was thanks to an AppStories listener that I became aware of it. A few days ago, listener Brad got in touch with me on Twitter and told me that modern Kobo eReaders support native integration with Pocket to read articles saved for later in a dedicated Pocket app for Kobo. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the news felt like a true revelation to me. I was familiar with the Kobo name before, but I’d never paid particular attention to its line of eReaders since Kindle is more popular and Amazon holds a de-facto monopoly on digital books. My bad.