I love to read. Books, articles, memoirs, random rants on random subjects- you name it, I’m a fan. Trouble is, though, more often than not, when I come across something I’d really like to read I don’t have time to read it. Then, a problem comes: where do I put it so I remember to read it, and can find it, later?

With anything online, the answer’s Instapaper. Instapaper is a web application (and an iPhone one) that lets you save Web pages to be read later. With the Web application, it’s a repository of your reading list, where you can read everything from one place.

With the iPhone app, which is a really killer application I’ve mentioned before, you can save the articles to your iPhone or iPod Touch to be read at any time, online or off. It’s great for reading on trains, subways, or in any location without Wi-Fi.

Instapaper’s an incredibly simple application. To get started, you create an account based on your email address. You can set a password, or not, depending on how much you care about the security of the application. Once you’re signed in, you can get started adding stuff to read!

To add articles to your list, go to the page you want to save. Either copy and paste the URL into Instapaper’s interface, or use the handy "Read Later" bookmarklet to automatically save pages. However you do it, pages go into your reading list, where you can find them all in one place. (You can even use the bookmarklet for the iPhone version by following these instructions).

 
Once you save a page, you can do several things with it. You can rename it by clicking "Edit," archive it once you’re done reading (it doesn’t get deleted, just in case), or see a purely text-only version. Every article also contains a link back to the original page- great for commenting, reading more, etc.

Though this may sound similar to just a bookmarking service, and in some ways it is, here’s where it really shines: the application knows you want to read, so it pulls the text out of the article and removes all the sidebars, ads, etc. You’re just shown the text, the part you actually care about, and it’s presented in an easy-to-read way.

To give you an idea of how it works, here’s an example. Just by saving the page, Instapaper turned this:

into this:

 
Maybe not as aesthetically pleasing, but extremely light-weight and easy to read. Instapaper’s designed for readers, and does a great job of giving you what you want to read and getting rid of everything else.

If you’re looking for an offline way to read online content, or just a lightweight and simple place to put it all, Instapaper’s a home run.