If you have used Amazon's website recently then you can't have avoided the Amazon Kindle eBook reader. Amazon have gone out of their way to make it as simple and easy as possible for the purpose of reading books. This device fulfills its purpose perfectly, allowing me to download books from the Amazon store and read them on an electronic ink display that is far closer to real print than it is to a computer screen. I get all the advantages of reading on an electronic device, but I find myself reading blissfully uninterrupted by tweets, emails and messages, and without the tired eyes that I would get from reading on a computer. There are even several thousand free out-of-copyright books available on the Amazon store - just go to the Kindle ebooks section and sort by price to see them. If that isn't enough, many more out-of-copyright books from Project Guttenberg are available in ebook versions for the Kindle. You can even download them directly from the Kindle by getting hold of The Magic Catalogue available here.
But books are not all that I read.
I also read several websites every day, often containing long articles. I am going to tell you several ways that you can read information from web pages on a Kindle using Instapaper, RekindleIT and KindleFeeder.com.
Instapaper
Instapaper is not aimed exclusively at Kindle users; it is actually quite a useful tool for just saving articles to read later. Unfortunately it has not been the hit that I would have liked it to be. The principle is quite nice. I placed a bookmark in my bookmarks bar as a button and authorised Instapaper to send documents to my Kindle. (The website will tell you how.) On finding a web page that I wanted to save and read later on my Kindle, I clicked that button and a few seconds later a message informs me that the article was saved.
To read the saved articles there is a choice. I can visit the Instapaper web site where there is a list of all the web pages I have saved for later. From there it is possible to follow the link back to the original web page, or click on a "Text" button which provides a much simplified view of the article for easy reading on the computer screen. This mode of operation is quite useful as a short term bookmark service even if you don't have a Kindle.
On that same web page there is a heading on the right called "Download" and one of the choices under that is an icon labeled "Kindle." I can click that icon to download a file which ends in ".mobi" - this is an ebook version of all the articles that I have saved. Once downloaded, I can simply attach the file to an email and send it to my Kindle email address, which can be found on the Amazon web site, and the saved web pages appear in a new book on my Kindle.
Buried deep in the settings of Instapaper there is also an option to send the file to my Kindle automatically once per day. Unfortunately in the week or so that I have been using it I have not been able to make this function work, although the "send now" button in the same area does work occasionally.
RekindleIT
RekindleIT is a powerful tool for reading long articles from the web. It requires a little configuration; I had to sign up to an account, then follow the instructions to create a bookmark button to sit in the browser toolbar and to tell Amazon that the email address used by ReKindleIT is allowed to send things to my Kindle.
Using RekindleIT is easy. On finding a long web page, I first click on the RekindleIT bookmark button. In the window that pops up, I enter my Kindle username (found on the Amazon web site) and then tick the "Reformat Article for Kindle" box if the page is quite complex, and click on "Send this file" to finish. The article is emailed to my Kindle after a short delay.
I have used RekindleIT many times in the last few days. Any time a website article that I am reading is likely to take more than a minute or two to read, I send it to my kindle with RekindleIT. This has been a much more pleasant and focused way to read a lot of articles.
kindlefeeder.com
Most web sites provide what is called an RSS feed. An RSS feed is simply a list of headlines, summaries, and possibly whole articles from a website. Using an RSS reader such as Google Reader, it is possible to list headlines from many websites all together in the one place. Obviously the idea of using the Kindle as an RSS reader is quite appealing.
I found kindlefeeder.com to be something of a disappointment, but that isn't actually their fault. The service is good. I signed up on the website, and was quickly able to add a number of RSS feeds to my list, both from a huge selection that they already know about, and adding some that were not listed. After choosing the RSS feeds that I wanted, it was simply a matter of clicking a button to have the whole lot delivered as an ebook to my Kindle.
Unfortunately the actual contents of the ebook were disappointing. Most websites, it turns out, do not include the whole article in the RSS feed. Taking the BBC news RSS feed as an example, what I actually got on the Kindle was usually the headline and about 20 words from the article summary, and a link to the article on the website. Although the Kindle has a web browser, it is not very good at all and I saw little point in using kindlefeeder to send what amounted to a set of links to my Kindle.
I also found that kindlefeeder can send regular updates to a Kindle automatically if you pay for the premium version, which is currently $20 per year.
Conclusion
So which options have I ended up using? Well, for a couple of frequently updated websites that I read a lot, I took the easy option and I subscribed via the Amazon store at a cost to me of £1 - £2 per month per site. It works well, and I receive every article from those sites as soon as they are published.
Up until getting my Kindle I have read the BBC news website for my daily news fix but for the first time ever I am regularly reading a daily newspaper which I have subscribed to via the Kindle at a cost of £14 per month.
Any time I come across a long web page that I want to read, I now hit the RekindleIT button, and with a couple of clicks it is sent to my Kindle. I tend to use RekindleIT rather than Instapaper because I am too impatient to wait a few hours to get several documents together, as well as due to the problems I have had with Instapapers automatic delivery.
Where Instapaper has proved useful to me is when reading a series of web pages, or articles or stories that have been spread over several pages. I have taken to sending each page to Instapaper, and then sending the Instapaper to my Kindle as a self contained book about that one subject.
This article appears in a longer form at the Refresh Technology website.