---
title: "A Chrome extension for people who love to read"
author: "Stan Voo"
url: https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/a-chrome-extension-for-people-who-love-to-read
published: 2011-05-01
summary: "I used to paste articles into Word just to print them cleanly. iReader did it in one click, and added page numbers, a short link and a QR code back to the source."
---

# A Chrome extension for people who love to read

The guys at [samabox](http://samabox.com/) have made, among [other things](http://samabox.com/extensions/), a fabulous Chrome extension (and are finishing a Firefox version): [iReader](http://samabox.com/extensions/iReader/).

It will appeal to those who read lots of articles right on screen or, like me, love printing them out for comfortable, old-fashioned reading on paper.

The app plugs into the browser, and when you're on a page with some long article (a blog post), an iReader icon appears at the right end of the address bar.

Click it and a lightbox-style window opens with the article's text cleaned of "junk": no sidebars, no ads and so on.

Here, for example, is how my previous post ["On meritocracy"](https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/on-meritocracy) looks in iReader:

*(Image lost: a screenshot of my post "On meritocracy" open in iReader.)*

The panel at the bottom appears only when you hover the mouse over that part of the screen.

The panel **lets you adjust the font size, switch off images within the text, print** the cleaned article (more on that below) and send a link to Twitter or Facebook.

What follows sounds like an ad for a weight-loss product.

I suffered for a long time preparing interesting articles for printing, ones long enough to print rather than read on screen. I had to copy the text into Word, delete pictures by hand or fix tables that didn't fit or simply weren't interesting.

iReader solved my problem! :)

It **sends to the printer** a text that's **already prepared**: a larger font, very small margins, the print date, page numbers (!) plus a link to the source at the end.

And it gives the link both as plain text (of course, it's paper, Captain Obvious!) and as a shortened link that's easier to type if you suddenly want to return to the article online.

What's more, the wonderful iReader adds to all this a [QR code](https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/how-to-use-qr-codes-and-track-them) of that very link. Isn't it a clever little thing?

*(Image lost: a photo of an iReader printout with its QR code.)*

True, the "Mail this page" button doesn't work for me for some reason, and it sends unshortened links to Twitter and Facebook. Then again, I haven't needed those functions yet.