Pocket adds new features, introduces Premium tier

Pocket Premium teaser

Pocket (formerly Read It Later), is a popular read-later service that lets you save content you don’t have the time to read right now. You can then enjoy saved items later on all your mobile/desktop devices and in the web UI.

Saved stories are stripped of all unnecessary graphics, ads and other bells and whistles that clutter online articles. Folks who research a lot like bloggers tend to use read-later services as their central repository of URLs.

For example, I use Pocket to keep stories containing snippets of information that I may or may not use in my future writing. There’s just one tiny problem: a saved URL is no good if an article gets deleted on the web. Enter Pocket Premium, your new subscription Pocket library that keeps a permanent copy of anything you save to it…

Available for $4.99 per month or $44.99 per year at the Pocket website, Pocket Premium includes a permanent copy of any article and webpage saved to it and sports advanced features unavailable to free users.

Pocket Premium (iPhone screenshot 001)

Pocket subscriptions are available both through their website and as In-App Purchases. By the way, the yearly subscription saves you 25 percent versus monthly.

The full Premium feature set includes:

Permanent Library: Pocket automatically keeps a permanent copy of what you save so it’s always accessible, even if it disappears from the web.

Powerful Search: Find exactly what you’re looking for by searching full-text, topics, tags, authors, and more.

Suggested Tags: Pocket delivers personalized tag suggestions anytime you edit tags. They can be applied with a single tap, so you no longer need to type, remember, or search for tags you’ve already used.

You can access your search history in Pocket and use advanced search operators to easily find a needle in the haystack. As for tag suggestions, the app learns from both your previously used tags and the item’s content so it gets smarter over time.

If you plan on upgrading to Pocket Premium, as soon as your subscription becomes active both new and existing items in your list and Archive become a permanent resource, which is quite nice.

It floors me that people have now saved an astounding one billion items to their Pockets.

Pocket Premium (web screenshot 001)

As a bonus, everyone who has updated their Pocket app to the new version 5.5 gets to enjoy an improved Tags screen and tag while reading in Article and Web View. Last but not least, Pocket’s browser extensions have been revamped to make it easier to tag, undo or save articles.

You can download Pocket free in the App Store.

The app is universal and requires iOS 7.0 or later.

The app can share to Evernote, stream videos via AirPlay in the background, re-surface your best and most relevant content, send saved articles directly to other Pocket users, detect URLs copied from apps like Medium and much more.

I want to know how you feel about Pocket’s move here. Is five bucks per month a fair price to pay for a permanent digital library, do you think?