What’s the difference between Safari ‘Reading Lists’ and bookmarks?

Safari 5 for Lion introduced ‘Reading List’ allowing users to bookmark stories and links for reading later. Since I wrote my article about the best features of Lion, a reader asked a very good question ‘What’s the difference between ‘Reading List’ and a bookmark? It doesn’t seem to cache it for offline viewing. What am I missing?’

This is a very good point. There isn’t much difference between a bookmark and bookmarking a link into your Reading List. What Apple has tried to do is give users a dedicated space where they can keep a list of links to read when they have the time to read them. Adding a link to your Reading List will place that link in the ‘unread’ category of your Reading List, The link will stay in your Reading List tray until you have read it, Once you have read the page it will be removed from the ‘unread’ category but will remain bookmarked under the ‘all’ category until you decide to delete it.

Reading List will become a complete on the road bookmarking solution when Apple release iOS 5 which will bring Reading List to the iPhone and iPad. This will allow you to keep your Reading List in sync across all your devices. For people who read a lot of online news this will become invaluable.

What I would say to readers is you should consider Reading List as a category based bookmarking solution designed specifically for ‘The things I want to read later’.