I Need to Read This: The Instant Version of Read It Later

Samuel Dean — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:00:51 +0000

Last year, I covered the very useful Firefox extension Read It Later. It’s the recipient of an award from Mozilla for the easy way it lets you make a note of web pages of interest that you don’t have time to read now, but want to read later. It’s still a Firefox extension, though, and even though you can install it quickly, the installation alone might keep some busy web workers from using it. So I noted with interest Josh Lowensohn’s post on a new service called I Need to Read This, where the service lets you save pages for reading later, but uses bookmarklets that you can get going with immediately.

I tried the I Need to Read This bookmarklets in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. (You do need to provide a username, email and password to get going.) In Internet Explorer, you simply right-click on the bookmarklet buttons that I Need to Read This provides, and then click “Add to Favorites.” In Firefox, just drag the bookmarklets directly into your bookmarks toolbar.

The primary bookmarklet for I Need to Read This adds the current page you’re on to your “to-read” list. A second bookmarklet, “Read an Article,” brings up the oldest article on your “to-read” list that you haven’t yet read.

It takes seconds to get going with these bookmarklets and they’re extremely useful as they can help you avoid letting interesting web-based content fall through the cracks when you don’t have time to stop and read.

There is a Firefox extension for I Need to Read This, which gives you more features, but it’s brand new, so if you’re going to install and learn a full extension, I would recommend Read It Later instead. If you want similar features that you can use instantly, see if I Need to Read This works for you. If not, the bookmarklets are polite and you can immediately jettison them.

How do you keep track of interesting content that you don’t have time to read?

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I Need to Read This: The Instant Version of Read It Later