Table of Contents

What Passages Is

On Collecting: The Case for Curation Over Consumption

Reading Offline: What We Lose in the Browser and How to Get It Back

What Passages Is

By The Passages Team — Published in passages.ink on May 1, 2026

There is a particular frustration that comes from reading something important on a screen and knowing, even as you read it, that you will lose it. The tab will close. The browser will forget. The essay that felt essential at eleven in the morning will be buried by noon, unreachable except through a search you won't quite remember how to phrase.

Passages is an answer to that frustration.

It is a tool for collecting articles — long essays, reported pieces, criticism, literary nonfiction — and turning them into ebooks you can carry on your e-reader. The act of saving is simple: paste a URL, use our browser extension or use the bookmarklet from any page. The act of composing is deliberate: you gather articles into a publication, give it a name, and bind it when it's ready. What comes out is a real file, formatted for reading, that belongs to you.

The name comes from the old publishing term for a short printed work — a passage extracted, set apart, made permanent. That is what this tool tries to do: take the ephemeral and give it a little weight.

Why an ebook?

The browser is full of distrations and the economy of the web did not evolve to support deep reading. An ebook reader has none of that. It is a single surface, lit softly, holding one thing at a time.

Reading a long essay on an e-reader is qualitatively different from reading it on a laptop. The posture changes. The attention settles. The piece gets the kind of time it was written to receive.

Who this is for

Passages is built for people who take reading seriously as a practice — not a productivity practice, but a human one. The kind of reader who annotates, who returns to things, who believes that an essay read well is worth more than twenty skimmed.

It is not a read-later app, though you can use it that way. It is closer to a small press for your own reading: deliberate, curatorial, unhurried.

You decide what goes in. You decide when it's ready. The machine handles the rest.

On Collecting: The Case for Curation Over Consumption

By The Passages Team — Published in passages.ink on May 1, 2026

There is a difference between reading and collecting.

Content can come from anywhere. RSS, Substack, Twitter, newsletters, recommendations, links in articles. We are surrounded by content. And quite often, it will come at a moment we are not ready to read it.

Reading, in the way the internet has taught us, is a continuous intake. Articles arrive through feeds and newsletters and recommendations; we open them, scan them, close them. The queue replenishes faster than we can empty it. What we call "reading" is often just a kind of managed accumulation — staying current, keeping up, not falling behind.

Collecting is different. It involves a pause, a decision, an act of will. To collect an article is to say: this one matters enough to keep. It is a small editorial judgment, made dozens of times, that gradually reveals something about what you actually care about.

The library you build

A publication in Passages is not a queue. It is a composition. You pull together articles that speak to each other — a reported piece alongside an essay alongside a critical review — and what emerges is something that resembles a book more than a feed. The relationship between the pieces is part of the meaning.

This is what curators do, and what editors do, and what any serious reader eventually starts doing informally: building reading lists that have a logic, that move in a direction, that leave you somewhere different from where you started.

The difference between consuming and collecting is the difference between eating and cooking. One is passive. The other involves judgment, taste, and a theory of what a meal should be.

Against the algorithm

Recommendation engines are good at giving you more of what you already like. They are not good at giving you what you should read next — which is often something uncomfortable, challenging, outside the territory you've already mapped.

A curated collection is a record of your own taste, which means it is also a tool for examining and expanding it. What themes keep appearing? What writers do you return to? What are you conspicuously avoiding?

The act of assembling a publication is, in a small way, an act of self-knowledge.

Why it matters that it ends up on paper

A file on an e-reader has a different status than a browser tab. It is finished. It is portable. It does not ask anything of you except attention.

The ebook is not the point of Passages — the reading is. But the ebook is what makes the reading possible: a container that holds the thing still long enough for you to give it what it deserves.

Reading Offline: What We Lose in the Browser and How to Get It Back

By The Passages Team — Published in passages.ink on May 1, 2026

What the browser costs

The browser is a miraculous tool and a difficult environment for reading. Everything in its design is oriented toward departure: the back button, the open tabs, the address bar always available for a new destination. Reading long-form text in a browser is like trying to have a quiet conversation in an airport. The infrastructure is not built for stillness.

There is also the matter of posture. Reading at a desk, on a laptop, the body is in a state of readiness — for the next task, the next notification, the next thing to do. An e-reader invites a different posture. You sit back. You hold the thing in your hands. The device is warm and light and asks only one thing of you.

These are small factors individually. Together they constitute an entirely different quality of attention.

The long essay needs time

There is a class of writing — the ten-thousand-word reported essay, the extended critical piece, the long-form profile — that was built to be read in a single sitting, the way a short story is. It has a shape. It earns its ending. Reading it in pieces, across three interrupted browser sessions over two weeks, is like watching a film in ten-minute increments on your phone: technically possible, substantially diminished.

An ebook reader makes the single sitting possible. You take the piece with you — to the couch, the train, the hour before sleep — and you give it the contiguous time it was written to receive.

Building the habit

The habit is not "read more." The habit is "read better" — which usually means "read with fewer interruptions, in better conditions, with more intention about what you bring."

Passages exists to lower the friction between finding something worth reading and reading it well. Save the article. Gather a few into a publication. Put it on your device. That is the whole workflow, and it takes less than a minute. What it returns — an hour of uninterrupted attention, in a form the writing deserves — is worth considerably more.

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Curated and bound with Passages
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