Instapaper, the reader app owned by betaworks, has today launched an update to the app that brings a few new key features to the experience.
With Instapaper 6.2, users will gain access to a feature called Speed Reader (video below), which highlights a single word at a time for a more focused and efficient reading experience. The update also brings with it faster saving of articles from mobile and Instant Sync, which is a faster and more reliable way of sending articles to your Instapaper app on iOS.
Instapaper recently redesigned the whole experience around the app, launching version 6.0 as a freemium model for the first time. Up until then, Instapaper had operated on a paid model, with the app costing between $3 and $4 on the App Store as well as $1/month for the subscription. But the redesign also introduced added value, such as a text-to-voice integration with Apple so that people could listen to their Instapaper articles read aloud.
With the 6.2 update from today, Speed Reader will be free to use ten times each month, and then will fall into the premium tier of the service.
Instapaper launched back in January of 2008 as one of the first readers that would let you save articles to mobile for later (and off-line) reading. Since launch, the service has seen quite a bit of competition in the space (namely from Pocket) and made of move to join the betaworks team through an acquisition in April 2013.
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Instapaper 6.2 Speed Reading from Brian Donohue on Vimeo.
