how to move all my internet reading to the Kindle?

March 12, 2015 9:45 PM

I enjoy reading on a Kindle much more than on a computer and I'd like to move to a workflow where anything I can't read in two minutes gets queued up for my Kindle. If you use your Kindle this way, please tell me about your workflow. In particular, how do you organize lots of short documents on your Kindle?

Right now my workflow is to use FiveFilter's Push to Kindle bookmarklet, which scrapes text off websites and emails them to my Kindle. This is fine as far as getting text onto the device, but once there it's just a mess.

Some features I want:

- to bundle together groups of related documents (e.g., all the links of a MeFi post and the MeFi discussion itself)
- to query for just unread documents on my Kindle
- to get notes back off my Kindle (e.g., if I read something and think, "Oh, I should look up this author" or "So and so would enjoy this too," but can't act on this until I get back to a computer)

Any ideas?

posted by d. z. wang to Technology (7 answers total)

I have Instapaper set up to send a digest of unread articles to my Kindle once a week. That may give you some of the functions above.
posted by girlgenius at 12:13 AM on March 13, 2015 [3 favorites]

I have the same need, and haven't found a solution for this yet.

Instapaper used to be decent for mefi threads, but now it's not as good at grabbing and displaying comments... I typically save both the article and the mefi page separately, but I would love to have a bundle of the two. Maybe use something like blogtrottr and combine the original link, and the comments rss feed for the mefi post ?

Through google search I've found snippefy which looks like a good solution for synchronizing highlights, although I haven't tried it myself.

I'm interested in what solutions others have come up with too. I'd love to be able to do that.
posted by motdiem2 at 6:10 AM on March 13, 2015

I use Readability "Send to Kindle" and simultaneously "Save for Later", So I have a record online of all the articles I've sent to my kindle and can search that more easily.
But it doesn't allow the bunching together you want and my Kindle now has like 1000s "items" on it.
posted by mary8nne at 10:05 AM on March 13, 2015

Calibre can pull 100 or so articles off of Instapaper and Pocket and create a Kindle-compatible file.
posted by AceRock at 9:02 PM on March 13, 2015

The GrabMyBooks add-on might help: http://www.grabmybooks.com/
posted by TristanPK at 2:16 AM on March 14, 2015

I do a lot of this myself. I too use the 'Push to Kindle' app to send to Kindle. I then set up collections on the Kindle and sort my stuff this way. However, I have only about 5 collections and it sounds like you're wanting to be more granular which might be a headache with a Kindle. One thing I do also is to take these articles and do backup using Sync Back Free to a folder on my computer. However I only copy the .azw files not the other stuff. Then if you have Calibre installed you can read these docs on your computer to your hearts content. It'd probably be a lot easier to sort into folders on the computer rather than on the Kindle. Also, I have downloaded the GrabMyBooks app but haven't messed with it much -- it looks very interesting and worthwhile.

Hope this helps.
posted by gilast at 7:39 PM on March 15, 2015

I use Readability. Pop in the URL of the article you want to send (you can include more than one URL in a 'document', click the Send to Kindle icon (once you've set that up) and you're good to go. It even offers some recommendations, and it'll keep track of your reading list.
posted by DandyRandy at 3:07 PM on March 17, 2015