How do you save your place when reading a long article?

Let’s say you’re reading a very long article on your Mac, iPhone or iPad. You have to step away, to come back to it hours or days later, possibly on a different device. How do you mark your place?

I’ve found Instapaper and Pocket to be unreliable for that, and Reading List for Safari doesn’t seem to offer that capability at all?

There’s a Chrome extension that supposedly handles that, but it only works on the desktop. Doesn’t help if I might start the article at lunch at my desk on my Mac, and finish it after dinner on the iPad.

No good answer — when possible I leave a browser tab open.

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This would be a super handy feature! I’m also in the ‘leave the browser tab open’ camp…but it isn’t a great solution.

I feel like the inability to do this also means I’m less likely to read long articles on the web.

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Leaving the browser tab open works when you come back to the same computer. Unless you reboot, or accidentally close the tab, or the tab refreshes for no good reason. But of course you already knew that.

I’ve had pretty good luck with Instapaper remembering my place and returning me to it whenever I want to continue, but realistically I tend to read moderate-length articles in one sitting and then send a digest of the really long ones to my Kindle, which is obviously flawless at remembering my place.

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I keep it in my reading list until I can read it all in one go. If it’s too long for that and I won’t remember my place, I put it in iBooks, which is great at remembering the current reading point. I used to use a bookmarklet to do the same for Kindle.

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How do you do that?!

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There is a “save PDF to iBooks” option in the share sheet when you’re in Safari. You might have to enable it first in More.

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oh nice! I will try that - great tip. I suppose you delete it from iBooks when you’re done?

Hmmm, I don’t see this. Nor is it a Share option to add it from System Preferences > Extension. Since “iBooks” became “Books” in Mojave, maybe the Share option went away with Mojave too?

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Could be an iOS thing. Just checked and see it on my phone using Brave.

Yes, sorry, this is on iOS Safari. When I read articles on macOS, I used a third party bookmarklet to send long articles to Kindle. I checked macOS and I don’t see any way to share to Books either.

It has to be real Safari, too; I’ve noticed that if you try to share from, say, the Safari view built into Gmail, it won’t actually reach its destination.

I do — The … menu → Remove → Delete Everywhere.

Edit: okay, there is a clever way to get articles into iBooks from Safari on macOS through the print/save to PDF menu! The Best And Easiest Way to Add PDFs to iBooks From Safari on a Mac | Apple Must

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