Kobo ereaders are swapping out Pocket for Instapaper

Rakuten and Instapaper have announced a new integration that lets you access saved articles on Kobo ereaders. The new feature replaces a similar one Rakuten used to offer for Pocket users, which it was forced to replace after Mozilla decided to shut down the read-it-later service in May 2025.

Instapaper on Kobo devices works nearly identically to the way Pocket did previously. With your Instapaper account linked, you can access any article you’ve saved to your library. Articles can be downloaded and accessed offline, and you can like, delete or archive them as you see fit. As someone who relied on the Pocket integration to work my way through a ridiculous backlog of saved articles, Instapaper makes a capable replacement. Really, the only thing the feature is missing at this point is support for handwritten annotations on Kobos with styluses, like the Kobo Libra Colour or Kobo Elipsa 2E.

Mozilla made the decision to wind down Pocket and a few other smaller products to conserve time and resources that might be better spent on Firefox. Instapaper itself was in decline following an acquisition by Pinterest in 2016, until the developers working on the service bought it back and took Instapaper independent in 2018.

Pocket and Instapaper aren’t one-to-one replacements for each other (Instapaper seems much less concerned with preserving images, for example) but they’re close. For anyone who relied on Pocket, Rakuten replacing the service with Instapaper is a best-case scenario. The new Instapaper integration is available globally on all currently supported Kobo ereaders.