FiveFilters: Send web articles to Kindle | Hacker News Reader

FiveFilters: Send web articles to Kindle

fivefilters.org

35 pointsrajeefmk21 comments

Why use this over http://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle? There's a browser extension as well.

This one does not have ads. Five filters comes with ads. Big differentiator!

We do not add ads to the articles. Our project goal is to promote independent, non-corporate media, so on occasion we have added links to criticism of certain corporate media outlets at the end of articles coming from said media.

very nice! Thanks for the tip!

With Amazon's notorious history of locking up / wiping devices in name of DRM (ref 1, ref2) , I wouldn't be surprised if people would prefer pushing it directly to kindle instead of through Amazon. (Atleast one layer scrutiny is avoided).

That said, this looks pretty clean.

Ref 1: http://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/oct/22/amazon-wipes-cu...

Ref 2: http://boingboing.net/2009/07/30/high-school-student-1.html

Doesn't matter. This site just sends it to Amazon to send to your kindle, it doesn't push it directly.

That's correct. It goes to your Amazon.com Kindle account. But we also let users download EPUB and MOBI versions directly without sending to Amazon servers. So that's also an option if you prefer to side load the files.

I'm the creator of the FiveFilters.org Push to Kindle service.

The technical difference, as far as I'm aware, is that the Amazon version works by using Javascript on your browser to identify the content block and send it to your account. We make a separate request for the content from the server. The JS method works better in many cases (e.g. if the page you're viewing is not publicly accessible - paywall perhaps). The implementation, however, is problematic for many people.

See user reviews of the Amazon version at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/send-to-kindle-for... and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sendtokindle/

User reviews of our extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/push-to-kindle/pna... and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kindle-it/ and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.fivefilter...

Another difference is that we offer an Android app and an email service to get articles to your Kindle account. Amazon does not offer this themselves yet. Their send to Kindle offering on Android is for personal documents on the device itself.

I should also add that when we released Push to Kindle, Amazon did not offer their own browser extensions. So although we weren't the first, we weren't competing with Amazon.

Did your sales drop off after Amazon released sendtokindle?

We only sell the Android app. Haven't noticed a huge difference there. I'm sure it would affect it if Amazon created an alternative. As for browser extension use, it's not something we actively track. But active user stats, reported by Chrome Web Store, have not been increasing much. Not sure if that's a direct result of Amazon's own extension, but could well be.

I tried using amazon's browser extension (for FireFox) and I must say its dead slow compared to this.

https://www.instapaper.com/ can send your unread articles to a Kindle automatically. I use it to send myself a weekly sampler of my unread items, which I've saved with it's bookmarklet.

I am totally hooked on Pocket; with Calibre it is great to have big 'books' with articles I put away for a rainy day.

This seems similar but more direct. I haven't checked it out yet but I did try other services and Pocket won because it would upload 50 articles in 1 'book' instead of 50 articles separated.

I also use pocket and it syncs automatically over wifi with my Kobo e-reader so whenever I go somewhere I've got my articles there on the reader. Rather neat actually and this is built in as a pleasant surprise.

If you already use pocket, then Pocket 2 Kindle https://p2k.co/manage/home is a good service to send stuff from your reading list, nicely formatted to your Kindle.

I wrote something similar (taking lists of URLs) a couple of years ago and it's still live at www.kindlized.com but when think about the next step of grabbing my Pocket article list I found Pocket 2 Kindle and never bothered to update my own - kind of fun and sad at the same time to discover that someone has already built the thing you just thought of :-)

I created a (admittedly much worse) Chrome extension to do this, but I also added the ability to concatenate several articles together, and send them as a single file.

The reason being, when I pick up my kindle, it's usually to read for an extended period of time, so I am prepared to go through the length of several articles. Also, my menu won't end up so cluttered with all the articles I sent.

If that's on the product roadmap for this, it would be wonderful.

I couldn't be happier with Kobo's Pocket integration. Kobo Glo HD is a wonderful device seamlessly syncing with you Pocket account. This feature is 40% why I bought Kobo(again).

I ran into this the other day. I couldn't justify paying $5 for the Android app.

Agree. The android app doesn't work as smooth as the web version. (Found out the hardway).

Sorry you had trouble with the Android app. Anything in particular that bugged you?

It's essentially a simpler interface to our web service. The same one used by the web app. So results should be the same from both. But you cannot see an article preview or edit the article's title as you can with our web app.

Oh, and thank you for submitting this here, btw. Was surprised to see it. :)

You're welcome. I've been an avid user of the web version ever since I bought my kindle. So kudos to your efforts :)

I was never able to use the Android app properly because it didn't allow me to use my kindle account. My account goes something like this name@kindle.com . But the Android app always added name@free.kindle.com.

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