Pocket is shutting down (link). For those who don’t know, Pocket was a read-it-later service that let you save links to articles and other text pages on your account, and allowed you have offline reading access to the content. It didn’t work perfectly on all websites, but there were a couple situations that I used it, where it was extremely helpful.

I used to save news articles and opinion pieces that were longer than a quick 5-minute-read for later reading on my e-reader (the obvious, intended way to use the service). I also used it to, funnily enough, read fanfiction. While browsing AO3 or some other website, it was easy to add short fanfics while browsing a single search, and read them comfortably all at once. Pocket’s tagging system made it easy to tag fandoms, ships, etc.

Pocket also had a neat feature where it would use text-to-speech to turn an article into an audiobook. It was really convenient for hands-free consuming.

I would say that my usage of the service was about 90% fanfiction (I never used TTS for this), and 10% news articles and blog posts. I’ve even used it on reddit to read original fiction from some of the writing subreddits.

The integration of Pocket with Kobo was one of key highlights for the device for me. No longer was I reading fanfic on my phone or tablet, which would keep me up into the late hours from the blue light. Instead, I was reading on my ereader, and getting a (probably) better night’s sleep.

In the past few months, AO3 has actually been blocking scrapers (including Pocket) due to not having enough server bandwidth to handle the traffic. They’ve been facing increasing costs from both growing human traffic, and AI language models abusing the vast collection of written works by real people. I haven’t been able to use Pocket like I normally do, even before this unfortunate announcement.

I hope Kobo will implement the same functionality with another service (It’s literally one of the main reasons I bought the device), but until then, my only workaround has been to download epubs from AO3 and use KoboFileServer to covert to kepub and transfer them onto the device. I wrote a guide on how to set this up.

For those of you who aren’t keen on technical solutions like KoboFileServer, another option is to use Send to Kobo/Kindle by Djazz. It’s a service operated by a single person, but it works fairly well. The only issue is that it may go down occasionally since it seems Djazz hosts it on their personal home server, meaning they’re still susceptible to internet and power outages.

I don’t know if I’ll figure anything else out, it’s just annoying to transfer multiple epubs for smaller fanfics, so I’ve been reading them on my phone. I’m honestly praying that Kobo is working on an alternative. I’ve also been looking into 3rd-party solutions like Wallabag. I would prefer not to pay for another service, since I already pay for Kobo VIP, so make it happen Kobo!!