While it may seem like an awesome idea to send every article you want to read to your Kindle I would recommend against it. Each article you send shows up as a separate document in Kindle’s Personal Document storage. And every one of these will show up in your Archive even if you have removed them from your device. In order to remove them from your Archive you have to go Amazon.com (Your Account > Manage Your Kindle > Personal Documents) and you have to delete them one-by-one with page refreshes after each. If you are quick you can squeeze in two deletions per page refresh.
Instead, if you want to read articles on your Kindle you should take advantage of a service that sends a compilation of articles as one document. I’ve tried Readability, Klip.me, and Instapaper. So far, Instapaper has offered the best experience.
Instapaper: Rocks but (Sort Of) Lacks Micropayments to Authors
I started using Instapaper on my iPhone a long time ago. It completely changed how I read. Later I got an iPad thinking it would offer a better reading experience than the iPhone. In some ways it was better but in many ways it was worse. Then I bought a Kindle. Instapaper + Kindle is amazing for text. I still use the Instapaper app on my iPhone and iPad but my first choice for text content is my Kindle.
Instapaper has had to reverse engineer the Kindle periodical format but they have done a stellar job. It is easy to navigate between articles and it is easy to see how far along you are in the article you are reading. You can request a new copy of your periodical from within the periodical itself. You can Archive, Like, and Like & Archive (but not delete) your article from within each article. It really is an enjoyable reading experience.
I’ve had a few issues with the Instapaper web app but they were always brief and more importantly not very common.
Klip.me: Failed to Entice
I did not use Klip.me for very long so it may be worth exploring further. It has an interesting feature in that it will allow you to edit the article but I don’t know if this works with their compilation or only when sending immediately.
It also appears to have a feature that some may find useful. It looks like it can send a compilation of all your Google Reader articles as well. I tend to scan headlines in Google Reader and then select the most interesting ones to read in Instapaper so this doesn’t work for my workflow.
Readability: Flawed But Noble
I really hate ads. Specifically I hate irrelevant, ugly, noisy, obnoxious ads. If your site has anything that remotely distracts me from actually reading the article then I will either not read the article or I will read it in Instapaper or Safari’s Reader. Readability stepped in here to offer an alternative to ads by orchestrating micro-payments to authors. I think this is an awesome idea and I hope some day it replaces the need of many authors to submit to obnoxious advertising.
Unfortunately, I found the web app to border on being unusable due to the following issues:
- Actions (delete/archive) seem to be frequently undone or forgotten.
- Poor title detection which resulted in useless titles such as the domain name of the site the article was from.
- Duplicate documents received by my Kindle which have to be removed from my device and from Amazon.com.
I am not sure Readability deserves 30% of subscription fees simply for being a middle man. In the past I justified their cut by saying I was paying 30% for the reading experience, the ability to share articles, etc. but they now offer everything but the author contributions for free. So now if I am a subscriber I am not only giving a middle man a 30% cut of money I think authors should get but I am also subsidizing any freeloaders who use the service without contributing.
I subscribed to Readability for several months but have now reluctantly turned it off. Technically I could let Instapaper sync my articles over to Readability; giving me the better user experience from Instapaper while still rewarding the authors I read via Readability. However, at this time I am not comfortable with the 30% cut and, perhaps, more importantly there is no way for me to tell that the authors I like are even receiving their funds or that my contribtuions are even significant.