Reading on an iPad is pretty great. Despite its various sins, Apple knows how to put a screen on one of its devices. Since I enjoy long-form journalism and essays, I was interested in seeing what options there are.

The ecosystem for this isn't good, though. There are plenty of paid news readers, and I'm not against paying for an app necessarily. But reviews seem to be fairly mixed for them, and given the wildly varying performance I'm loathe to buy something sight-unseen (especially since Apple doesn't generally allow refunds on the App Store).

But Instapaper I'd heard of. It's been around for awhile, and is also free. I remember it was hugely popular once upon a time. So cool, let's give it a shot.

The actual experience of reading on it is great. The problem is that it sucks at everything else.

First: it doesn't actually eliminate any other apps. You still have to use something else to actually get content and send it to Instapaper. This is especially bizarre since it does actually have the functionality to go grab stuff off the Internet within the app: the so-called "Browse" screen. The problem, of course, is that you don't get to choose where it gets this content. So if you want to have an RSS feed in there, you either have to send content over with a dedicated RSS app, or use a separate service like IFTTT. This last was, in fact, what Instapaper's customer support recommended when I asked them about this.

But hey, you can get a more reader-friendly version of the page without extraneous content! Oh wait, Safari on iOS can do that. But , you can save stuff to read offline! Oh, Safari does that too.

So their schtick seems to be that if you find something when you're online, you can send it to Instapaper to read when you're not. Okay, but again, Safari does this. Instapaper is better-looking, but not by that much (and you can do things like change the font or color scheme on Safari's reader view too). I guess it's cool that I could send stuff from a computer to read later?

Next, it sucks at what it actually does too. Since I'll be spending Thanksgiving in Luddite Country (my dad doen't have WiFi to speak of), I thought I'd grab some content from a favored blog or two to have when I'm down there. So I go to Safari, and then hit the button to send things to Instapaper.

I sent 8 articles from 4 sites, in quick-ish succession since I knew what I wanted. I then opened Instapaper. First, it doesn't start actually downloading them until you open it, which means you have to do that before you leave WiFi. It then downloads each article at unbelievably slow speeds, with one failing. Finally, one of the 8 articles I sent never showed up at all.

So: doesn't add any capability, requires other apps that can literally do the same thing it does only faster, and then fails at its stated purpose.

I'm not really sure who this is for.