Offline Reading

As much as the Web is great, it has one downside: it is not always available. This may sound weird to California residents, but yes, there are other worlds out there, and offline is and will be there and simply cannot be ignored.

Personally I find the best "content consumption" opportunities when being offline. A long-haul flight is one such example. And while airlines do their best to keep us connected when airborne, the in-flight wifi is both expensive and not very reliable.

Pocket addresses this very opportunity and while being late to the party, I enjoy it a lot. The integration of Pocket into Feedly is awesome and extremely efficient in sorting news feeds. I absolutely love Pocket's article view: the content nicely formatted and stripped of the advertising bloat. The only moment when Pocket fails is when Feedly comes across a PDF file. Pocket can't handle PDFs in offline mode and struggles with them even when online.

Looking for an alternative solution to offline archiving of PDF files across many devices on different platforms, it looks like I've settled for Kindle. Kindle handles PDFs very well and for some time has been keeping them synchronized among all devices connected to a single account. For some reason it also comes up much more often as a sharing target on iOS, so almost any iPad source app is capable of sending a PDF to Kindle (I tried that with Google Drive and this is not the case).

The weird thing is the workflow sometimes involves 4 apps: Feedly → (pressing the Pocket button) → Pocket → (open in Safari) → Safari → (share) → Send to Kindle.

But the bottom line is it seems like today Kindle has won as an archive platform for PDF files. I wonder why this is not on Pocket's radar? I'd be ready to pay premium recurring dollars for such feature.