Marco Arment on Instapaper’s intent:
When you have something of significant length on the Internet, normally the tendency would be to skim over it, or to just read a little bit of it. “Then oh, I want to get to the next item in my feed reader, or something else is going on on my sceen…” As a result people don’t really read a lot of long-form content online…
Instapaper is a tool to encourage the publishing of significant, substantial content on the Internet by making it easier for readers to attentively read it.