How to send web content directly to your Kindle

Yesterday Lifehacker told everyone about Send to Kindle, a new extension for the Chrome web browser that lets you email articles and blog posts directly to your Kindle. It’s a great tool, but not very useful if you don’t use Chrome.

Here are some other easy ways to quickly send content to your Kindle from other web browsers, or from your desktop.

RekindleIT

This one precedes Send to Kindle by more than a year, and it’s supposed to work in Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Mobile Safari as well as Firefox. I tested it on Firefox and it worked fine.

To enable it, you’ll have to add a RekindleIT email address to your approved senders list on your “Manage My Kindle” settings page on Amazon.

Since it was released before the Kindle 3, its instructions say that choosing the “free” option means you’ll get the file back via email and have to manually copy it over. In reality, the test article I used appeared on my Kindle 3 Wi-Fi model without any problems.

Instapaper

Instapaper is a great browser tool for saving long articles and posts to read later, when you’re not surfing the web. It also has a “Download” section in the sidebar of Instapaper.com where you can grab a single file that contains all of your most recent Instapaper articles in ebook format. You can then use your normal email account to mail that file to your free.kindle.com email address. This is a good alternative if you want to send lots of articles over at the same time, because they’ll be bundled into a single document with a table of contents.

Instapaper can also be used in a couple of other ways that require even less work on your part:

• Auto-Delivery: If you sign up for an account at Instapaper, you can set up a delivery schedule where the service will automatically email you your saved articles as a single file once per week.
   
• Auto-Sync vis USB: If you regularly plug in your Kindle to your PC, the free apps Ephemera (Mac) and Wordcycler (Windows) will sense when the Kindle is connected, download your Instapaper articles to the desktop, and copy them over to your device.

Two other services, Readability and Readable, both do a fine job of stripping out excess formatting so you can read web pages more easily. Unfortunately, they don’t offer a way to then email that reformatted article to your Kindle. (Readability’s email feature just sends a link, and Readable doesn’t offer one at all.)

However, if you’re looking for a completely private solution that doesn’t require sharing any email addresses with third parties, you can use one of these two tools to create a text-only version, then copy and paste that into a new email message and send it to your free.kindle.com address yourself.

Non Kindle Bonus Tool! dotEPUB

Nate over at The Digital Reader pointed me to dotEPUB, a web based tool that will take any URL you give it and convert it into a downloadable .epub file. It sounds like a useful conversion tool if you use pretty much any device other than a Kindle.

(Photo: uzbeckistan)