You’ve Been Scrolling Wrong The Whole Time

MagicScroll, a free bookmarklet, turns any website into a flippable ebook.

Scrolling is lost time. Even with with truly smooth scrolling, which is supported by browsers in the latest versions of both major operating systems, every second spent moving text is time that you can’t spend reading it.

MagicScroll, a Chrome plugin and bookmarket, lets you scroll through text without moving it. It cleans and paginates sites, not unlike Instapaper, but has an interface designed for laptops and desktops, not mobile devices. The page-flipping can be either instantaneous or progressive, like this :

I wouldn’t mind a version that didn’t reformat the page — that simply paginated the entire website, graphics and ads and all, to let me use the wipe-to-scroll gesture. But I’ve been using this for a few days, and like it more than either Safari’s Reader Mode or the Instapaper text-cleaning bookmarklet.

It’s worth a try, at least. You can install it here.