Paperweight — Read Later, Stored as Files

Save articles to read later. Your library is a folder of Markdown files on your own machine. No account, no server.

Save an article now, read it later — and keep it forever, because your library is just a folder of files on your own computer. Pocket shut down and deleted its libraries. Omnivore shut down before it. The replacements ask you to trust another company's servers, or to run a database on a home server. Paperweight is the third option: everything stays on your machine, and there is no service to shut down. HOW IT WORKS Press Alt+Shift+S on any article, or click the toolbar icon. Paperweight extracts the text, strips the ads and scripts, and stores it. Choose a folder once and every article you save is also written there as a Markdown file with a clean filename like 2026-08-27-notes-on-reading-offline.md. That file is the point. Put your folder in Dropbox, iCloud or Syncthing and you have sync without an account. Point it at an Obsidian vault and your reading queue opens on your phone. Uninstall Paperweight and every article you saved is still there, readable in any text editor. WHAT YOU GET • A distraction-free reading view with light and dark modes, four text sizes, and your scroll position remembered per article • Highlights that are written into the article's own file, under a Highlights heading, so they outlive this extension • Tags, a reading queue and an archive • Search across titles, sites and tags — and inside the full text of every article you have saved • Offline reading, because the text is already on your disk • Import from Pocket and Instapaper exports, or any CSV with a URL column • A one-file JSON backup you can take anywhere ABOUT PERMISSIONS It makes no network requests. No account, no sign-up, no analytics, no telemetry, nothing sent anywhere. The one exception, stated plainly: images inside a saved article are kept as links to the original site, so displaying them contacts that site while you read. Settings has a switch to turn images off and make reading completely offline. OPEN ABOUT THE LIMITS • Chrome asks you to re-confirm folder access once per browser session. The library shows an Allow access button and writes anything queued the moment you grant it. • Highlights spanning several paragraphs are saved and exported correctly, but are not re-marked visually when you reopen the article. • Pages behind paywalls or heavy JavaScript sometimes extract poorly. You will see the word count before you commit.