Marco Arment created Instapaper, a tool that strips clutter from online articles and saves them for later reading, because he couldn’t concentrate at his desk. As the former chief technology officer for Tumblr, his Mac Pro’s screen was always pulling him away to do something else.
“In the modern desktop environment, with multitasking and alerts and constant activity, there are always more distractions,” Arment told Wired.com in a phone interview. “When you’re at a computer, your hands are always on the controls.” Whether you’re watching a video or reading an article, he explained, you can always click away to check e-mail or switch to another application, ready to do the next thing.
What’s next for Arment is making Instapaper, the one-time hobby that became a beloved and award-winning iOS application, an even more powerful e-reading application.
Writer, designer and e-reading expert Craig Mod recently called Instapaper his “favorite digital reading experience,” combining the flexibility of HTML design with the clean minimalism of e-books: “It’s lovely and a great baseline to which other e-readers should aspire.”
To get beyond that baseline, Arment recently left Tumblr to work on his former side project full-time.
The purpose of Instapaper is to promote what Arment calls “attentive reading” in the face of digital distraction. It doesn’t reject the web, but affirms it.
On the one hand, it recognizes that we increasingly do more reading on computers and other electronic screens. On the other hand, it tries to extract items of lasting value, removing them from the most toxic aspects of that environment, so we can focus on them more effectively.
“People love information,” Arment said. “Right now in our society, we have an obesity epidemic. Because for the first time in history, we have access to food whenever we want, we don’t know how to control ourselves. I think we have the exact same problem with information.”
We accumulate thousands of unread e-mails — and the attendant guilt about not having read or answered them — only to empty out our inboxes and start over again. It’s as if we’re suffering from an entire range of collective information disorders: When we’re not binging, we’re purging.
Because we have access to food whenever we want, we don’t know how to control ourselves. I think we have the exact same problem with information.
Web media, Arment said, has evolved to fit this environment. Everything is shorter, bullet-pointed, structured to catch and hold a reader’s attention for a few moments, and then ideally e-mailed or tweeted or reposted.
Social networks and feed readers have developed their own alerts, guaranteeing that we keep them in our information stream. It’s the office productivity workflow, recycled for institutionalized distraction.
You might think that smartphones and other mobile devices would only accelerate this trend, and to some extent they have. Twitter comes from text messaging, and low-resolution viral videos are tailor-made for tiny screens. But when Arment developed Instapaper as an application for iPhone and then the iPad, he discovered something different.
“Instapaper wouldn’t be of as much value if it weren’t for these mobile and e-reader devices. They give you a separate physical context for reading,” Arment said. Away from the office, desk and desktop, with each application taking up the entire screen, a reader’s eyes and hands all have to learn how to behave again. For the iPhone, Arment even created a function that would auto-scroll through an article if you tilted it backwards, to take the user’s hands completely out of the equation.
The fewer productivity tools a device has, the better it works as a reading machine. “One reason I love the Kindle, more so than the iPad, is that on the Kindle you can’t do anything else but read,” Arment said. “It’s the best, because it does the least. It doesn’t even show a clock.”
There are a few ways to get Instapaper articles onto the Kindle in the Kindle’s magazine format, including wireless e-mail delivery and downloading and syncing over a wired connection. And though the iOS apps are still vastly more popular, he said, requests for Instapaper support on the new Kindle 3 have shot up exponentially.
Given this surge in interest, I asked Arment whether he might be gearing up to release an Instapaper app for Kindle. “It’s definitely a bigger market now,” he said, hedging a bit.
The problem for a content-delivery app is that Amazon restricts the amount of 3G bandwidth applications can use. Any Instapaper app would have to be Wi-Fi only and abandon backwards compatibility.
Another problem is that the current Kindle Development Kit also doesn’t allow as much access as Apple’s iOS does to core technologies like web rendering and hooking into other applications. Essentially, any Instapaper app for Kindle would require recreating all of the coding work Arment did to originally turn Instapaper posts into Kindle magazines.
“Amazon didn’t anticipate this kind of use of their devices,” Arment said. “What I’d like to do is work with Amazon to make what I’m doing now [delivery as a Kindle magazine] better.”
