Instapaper Launches ‘Notes’ To Let Users Annotate Text

Instapaper, the app that lets you save and share online articles, has just launched a new annotation functionality called Notes.

The feature allows users to select a piece of text from an article or other work, and make comments on that text. By default, Notes is set to private so no one can see your annotations. If they so choose, users can share their notes through the Twitter’s textshot feature, which looks like this:

It was incredibly difficult to pick just one quote from this article by @choire http://t.co/hjGxMJa5Gd pic.twitter.com/8hkVw7XYx2

— Brian Donohue (@bthdonohue) June 4, 2015

Users can also share through other third-party iOS applications, such as Facebook, Evernote and Tumblr, or through a new IFTTT trigger.

Finally, if you want to share everything by default, Instapaper added a button that lets you choose to “Share All Notes.”

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Back in September of last year, Instapaper underwent a huge overhaul as it transitioned to a freemium model. Since, the company has added more and more functionality, such as Speed Reading, and now Notes.

Without asking for an up-front payment from the user, the onus is now on Instapaper (as it competes with services like Pocket) to offer premium features that are worth paying more for, instead of using the free version of the service.

If you want to check out Instapaper 6.4, head over here.