This is just a quick follow-up to my post about sending articles from Longform.org to your Kindle. While I’d sussed out how to do this with just one click from my laptop, I hadn’t found a reliable way to do so from my Android phone. Or at least not a way that didn’t require lots of annoying tapping around to get it done.
What I wanted was a way to use the ‘Share via’ function in the Android browser, and have ‘Send to Kindle’ be one of the options presented (alongside the usual suspects like Facebook, Twitter, etc).
After trying a couple of apps that didn’t consistently do the trick (nor offer much guidance on how to fix the glitches), and plus not really wanting to have the Amazon Kindle app taking up space on my phone, I tried the Push to Kindle app by FiveFilters.org.
Hey presto! It works really well and I found the instructions on how to set it up straightforward, which means it’s worth paying the £1.50 they charge. And even better, it uses Readability‘s early open source code – which means the article that reaches your Kindle is all cleaned-up and easy to read.
The developers even made a little video to show you how to use it:
(Tip: In the ‘Send from’ section of the set-up screen I just used my personal email address, because I’ve already set that up to be one of the email addresses from which my Kindle will accept articles.)
Download Push to Kindle from Google Play
By the way, if you’re looking for good longform stuff to send to your Kindle, some other sources I’ve been using recently in addition to Longform.org are:
- The Electric Typewriter
- The Long Good Read
- The Feature
- @IfYouOnly on Twitter
- Longreads.com
- The Browser
- The #longreads hashtag on Twitter, which tends to include a mixture of stuff from the above sources
And a few recent favourite articles I’ve encountered:
- Scandals of classic Hollywood: Warren Beatty thinks this song is about him
- David Sedaris: The man who mistook his hat for a meal
- Is Kip Litton a marathon fraud?
- The Chase Is the Thing and the Thing Is the Chase: Learning to Love Failure
- I Was One of America’s Top Psychics — And Like All of Them, a Complete Fraud
- The secret mainstream: contemplating the mirages of Werner Herzog
- Don’t wear yum-yum yellow – Travels through the Hidden World of Sharks
- An Inquiry Into the Very Public Private Marriage of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise
- Inside the Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night (the article that inspired Saturday Night Fever)
- How We’re Wrecking Our Feet With Every Step We Take
- Corruption, Murder, and the Beautiful Game
- Loch Ness Memoir
- I Was an A-List Writer of B-List Productions
Hi Stuart, I’m glad you found our Push to Kindle app useful.
One small correction though: we do not use Readability.com’s service, so no account is required to use Push to Kindle. We do make use of early Readability code, which was open source and used by many other companies, including Apple in its Safari browser.
Thanks, Keyvan from FiveFilters.org
Thanks Kevyan – I’ve corrected the sentence in question.
Thanks for all the link action – I need more stuff to read.
I use Instapaper, which has lots of good suggestions for things to read (and you can follow your friends too). The annoying thing for me is that I’ve got a Kobo so I can’t just push it to Kobo automatically – I have to use Calibre and faff about.