Open Library
openlibrary.org
A catalogue page for every book ever published, many of them borrowable
Free account
Loading page
trailfire.com
Strung pages into a guided trail with a note on each stop.
Use Instapaper instead
Saves an article for later and strips it down to just the text. The free tier caps notes at five a month, and full-text search plus the permanent copy of saved articles are Premium features.
Open InstapaperTrailfire let you build a sequence through several websites and annotate each stop, so a reader followed a curated path instead of a list of links — a genuinely good teaching format. It needed a browser plug-in at exactly the moment plug-ins became unfashionable, and it closed. Nothing has quite replaced the annotated-trail idea.
Questions
No. Trailfire is no longer running and trailfire.com does not serve the tool any more. Instapaper is the closest current equivalent — it saves an article for later and strips it down to just the text.
Yes. Trailfire sends your input to its own servers to process it. That is fine for public material; for anything containing personal data, use one of the on-device tools instead.
Closed; published trails were not exportable and are lost.
Alternatives
Same category or same task, ordered by how closely they overlap.
openlibrary.org
A catalogue page for every book ever published, many of them borrowable
archive.ph
Freezes one page on demand into a snapshot that keeps working when it moves
arxiv.org
Free preprints in physics, maths, computer science and quantitative biology
feedly.com
Collects the sites you follow into one reverse-chronological list you control
scholar.google.com
Searches academic papers and shows who has cited each one since
instapaper.com
Saves an article for later and strips it down to just the text