Culture - 4 min read
The quiet pleasure of bookmarking
By Sam O'Connell - 8 May 2026 - 1 views
Photo: Anthony Tran on Unsplash
Folders, tags and the small ritual of saving an essay you mean to come back to. A defence of the bookmark in an age of infinite feeds.
The argument against bookmarks is that you never visit them. The argument for bookmarks is that they are not, in fact, a to-do list. They are a small kindness to your future self.
I started keeping a "read later" folder around 2007. It is now embarrassingly large. But it is also, by accident, a journal of the things I have found interesting for nearly two decades. The unread URLs are not the point; the act of saving is.
A friend who is a librarian once told me that the most valuable thing about a library is not the books, but the catalogue. She is, in her quiet way, completely right.
So I bookmark. I tag. I name folders with weird private acronyms. And occasionally - perhaps once a month - I open one at random and read it. It is almost always better than what was in front of me.
I started keeping a "read later" folder around 2007. It is now embarrassingly large. But it is also, by accident, a journal of the things I have found interesting for nearly two decades. The unread URLs are not the point; the act of saving is.
A friend who is a librarian once told me that the most valuable thing about a library is not the books, but the catalogue. She is, in her quiet way, completely right.
So I bookmark. I tag. I name folders with weird private acronyms. And occasionally - perhaps once a month - I open one at random and read it. It is almost always better than what was in front of me.
