Since my 3-year-old boy has been spotted buying a few ebooks on my wife's Kindle, I have disconnected her Amazon account from it. Other than putting a password lock on Kindle landing screen, I could not find a way to make ebook buying experience child-proof. Since then, it has been taking up space on our nightstand.
A few weeks ago, I started look for a way to utilize the Kindle for the second time. This time I had a clear idea of what I wanted. I wanted to use it as news reader. Instead of picking up newspaper each morning, I thought, it would be nice to power up Kindle to get my news from different sources. Not just news from Facebook Interests or Twitter, but from all sources like Google News, Google+, LinkedIn News and other blog sites.
My success criteria will be simple yet elusive one. If my wife and I can find something interesting and keeps us informed, then it will be a success for me. Another important factor is offline viewing. Because we don't have 3G access from the Kindle, news content has to be downloaded and available for reading on the device.
While searching for a service like that, it led me to Kindlefeeder and Klip.me. Kindlefeeder is a RSS reader service that delivers *.mobi file to your Kindle email address. You can subscribe to multiple RSS feeds, and then schedule the feeds to be delivered to your Kindle (scheduling is not available from free service; with freemium, user has to manually trigger the delivery).
Klip.me is a simple Kindle delivery browser plugin. Once you install the browser plugin, user can click a button to send a copy of displayed article to your Kindle email address.
As popularity of tablets continue to pick up, I expect newspaper delivery service on device like Kindle to be quite useful. If Kindlefeeder can offer a way to suggest interesting content in addition to RSS subscription, it will be a good starting point. I have a feeling that this will be a good personal project.
A few weeks ago, I started look for a way to utilize the Kindle for the second time. This time I had a clear idea of what I wanted. I wanted to use it as news reader. Instead of picking up newspaper each morning, I thought, it would be nice to power up Kindle to get my news from different sources. Not just news from Facebook Interests or Twitter, but from all sources like Google News, Google+, LinkedIn News and other blog sites.
My success criteria will be simple yet elusive one. If my wife and I can find something interesting and keeps us informed, then it will be a success for me. Another important factor is offline viewing. Because we don't have 3G access from the Kindle, news content has to be downloaded and available for reading on the device.
While searching for a service like that, it led me to Kindlefeeder and Klip.me. Kindlefeeder is a RSS reader service that delivers *.mobi file to your Kindle email address. You can subscribe to multiple RSS feeds, and then schedule the feeds to be delivered to your Kindle (scheduling is not available from free service; with freemium, user has to manually trigger the delivery).
Klip.me is a simple Kindle delivery browser plugin. Once you install the browser plugin, user can click a button to send a copy of displayed article to your Kindle email address.
As popularity of tablets continue to pick up, I expect newspaper delivery service on device like Kindle to be quite useful. If Kindlefeeder can offer a way to suggest interesting content in addition to RSS subscription, it will be a good starting point. I have a feeling that this will be a good personal project.
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| Imagine personalized newspaper getting delivered to your e-reader each morning. It should be really simple to set up to gain user adoption. |
Readability is similar to Klip.me. And Instapaper has excellent Kindle support for syncing your saved-for-later articles. I use Pocket for shorter articles which I can comfortably read on iOS devices and Instapaper for longer ones so I can read them on Kindle.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Minwoo. I'll check them out.
DeleteOne thing I noticed with Klip.me was lack of paginated content support. When article spans multiple pages (like most blog posts from Forbes for example), Klip.me does not grab all the pages.
It looks like Readability reproduces the original content the best. Instapaper was easy to set up and fool-proof API to add/remove URLs, but did not reproduce images and failed to recreate the entire article in some instances (Forbes blog example).
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