Instapaper is an application aimed at time-shifting the consumption of online content, including journalism. It was launched in 2008 by developer Marco Arment, who at the time was the lead developer of Tumblr, and was bought in 2013 by Betaworks.

Instapaper allows users to click a bookmarklet whenever they come across an article they would like to read later; typical candidates include long magazine articles. Once clicked, the article is stripped of ads and clutter, saved on Instapaper’s servers, and made available for offline reading in Instapaper’s iPhone and iPad apps. Instapaper also connects to Amazon’s Kindle.

Instapaper is perhaps the most popular of a number of services aimed at encouraging long-form reading, including Read It Later, Readability, and Longreads.

Instapaper and its ilk have encouraged some news organizations to experiment with less cluttered reading environments, although they have also been controversial for some because of their extraction of content from its surrounding advertisements. Readability, in response, has created a program for publishers that pays them a small amount when their articles are read within the service.