TLDR: when I read I try to read actively, which for me mainly involves using various tools to annotate content: highlight and leave notes as I read. I've programmed data providers that parse them and provide nice interface to interact with this data from other tools. My automated scripts use them to render these annotations in human readable and searchable plaintext and generate TODOs/spaced repetition items. In this post I'm gonna elaborate on all of that and give some motivation, review of these tools (mainly with the focus on open source thus extendable software) and my vision on how they could work in an ideal world. I won't try to convince you that my method of reading and interacting with information is superior for you: it doesn't have to be, and there are people out there more eloquent than me who do that. I assume you want this too and wondering about the practical details. That bothered me increasingly until I bought a Kindle which had 'highlight' functionality and virtual keyboard; and I had discovered it to help a lot with recalling. In particular, often I'd run on something on the internet that I remember reading before. If I have annotations for that, I can quickly go through them and restore the context. If I don't have any highlights, it probably means that the content was not interesting at all for me. TODO list and step up your spaced repetition game. I'm going to review some of the tools I tried using and still using and highlight their different positive and negative aspects. If you're getting impatient, you can skip straight to my comparison table. I won't really write much about it for one reason which is a big deal: while you can highlight text, you can't leave notes. Nearest functionality is 'recommending' a highlight while reading a comment, but that's only displayed on your 'timeline'. Pocket API doesn't support exporting highlights too, or to be precise it seems to be hidden. If you need it you can use my script where I hacked around it. Also, interesting enough, Kobo reader has got Pocket integration, but for some reason when you read Pocket articles on Kobo, you can't highlight at all (let alone syncing highlights with Pocket). Not sure what's the purpose of this integration. Pocket was acquired by Mozilla in 2017, which might be a good thing, but so far their main focus seem to be readability features. You can also read a rant raising similar issues to what I mentioned. I won't go into Instapaper's readability capabilities (e.g. fonts and article formatting) because it's not something I care much about, so you might be better off googling that for yourself, here I'll concentrate on annotating aspect. https://www.pdfhelp.net -It-Later App Showdown: Instapaper vs. Pocket; screenshot of annotation interface. So, to read something in Instapaper, first you'll have to import the article into it (to unclutter and optimize it for reading). Due to this import process, you can only read and highlight in Instapaper's app, and you can only see your highlights there as well, which is its main limitation for me. The only reason I'm using it at all is that its Android app has got offline capabilities, so I would export to Instapaper things I want to read on the tube while I don't have connection and read/comment while offline. Mind that free version of Instapaper has got 5 notes per month limit. Instapaper got Json API, through which you can access your saved articles, comments and highlights. I'm using a fork of python wrapper to access it. Highlights are only stored as text though (as opposed to CSS/xpath locators), so there is no easy way to match them against original text apart from some sort of fuzzy search. Search function works for full text search in saved articles, but doesn't let you restrict search for highlights, and you can't search in notes at all. One red flag was in 2018 when Instapaper wasn't available in Europe for few months until they resolved GDPR issues. While I don't blame it on Instapaper, this is a kind of thing that happens when you don't own your data and use a closed source product. Wallabag is the most mature open source/selfhosted read-it-later kind of project I know of. Here's a review featuring some screenshots of their web app and Android app. It's very similar to Instapaper in terms of having to import the article in Wallabag in order to annotate it. I used it for a while and only had some issues with importing articles heavy on MathJax backed Latex. There is also an Android app, but sadly it lacks support for highlighting. I wish it had more attention from the community, and might try to work on Android annotation when I got more time. Hypothesis is simply awesome and my favorite web annotation tool. Their killer feature is that it embeds a bit of JS in the page to provide an in-browser overlay, so you don't have to leave the page you were reading and can highlight and add comments natively.