I kind of stumbled on this trick yet it’s been on Instapaper.com’s website probably for quite some time now.
I was looking at the articles I have saved away in Instapaper when my eyes caught the word ePub on the right sidebar. Knowing that ePub is the format that iBook uses for it’s books on the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad, I was curious as to what it would do.
In fact, there are three choices: Printable, Kindle and ePub.
I clicked on the ePub link and after a few seconds of browser spinning, my download manager sprung to life and was downloading a file called: Instapaper-ReadLater-2010-08-12.epub.
I dragged the file into iTunes and sync’ed my iPad, and sure enough, my Instapaper articles were happily sitting in iBook waiting to be read.
As you can see by the above screen shots, Instapaper does an amazing job of creating an e-book out of the articles you have saved to read later. Each article saved is a separate index item for easy access.
Another trick to Instapaper and the iPad, you can load up Instapaper.com in Mobile Safari. Tapping on the ePub link on the page will create then download the epub file and ask you where you would like to open the file.
This only works on the iPad or iPhone/iPod touch with iOS 4.x and only if you have an application installed that can take ePub files other than iBook.
This is rather unfortunate since other applications can open files, why didn’t Apple program the ability to open ePub e-books into iBook from within the iPad?
Hopefully, a future version of iOS for the iPad or a newer version of iBook will rectify this situation. Still, you can open the ePub with ReaddleDocs or GoodReader and other applications capable of opening ePub files.
So if you are looking for a way to read your Instapaper saved articles while on the move, just click the ePub link, drag the downloaded file to your iTunes and sync your iPhone/iPod touch/iPad and you will be ready to read at your leasure.
