I tweeted earlier this morning about automatically sending interesting links I find on twitter to my Kindle. Since two people (@saffrontrail and @_a_muse) asked me how this was done, and it won’t fit in tweets, here’s a blogpost that explains the process. Hopefully it’ll benefit other people also.
First here’s what you need:
- A Twitter account
- A registered Kindle
- An instapaper.com account
- An ifttt.com account
Here’s what you have to do:
- Create an instapaper account.
- Once this is done and you’re logged in, go to Instaper’s Kindle settings page
- You’ll see an email address which is something like kindle.xxxxx@instapaper.com. Save this for Step 2.
- You’ll have to fill in your Kindle’s email address. At this point, you’ll have to run Step 2 in parallel.
- Set up your Kindle to receive email. To do this:
- Login to Amazon. Find the link that says Manage Your Kindle and head there.
- Click on ‘Personal Document Settings’ in the sidebar.
- You’ll now see your Kindle’s email id. Take this back to the instapaper Kindle settings page, and fill it in.
- Also, in the ‘Approved Personal Document Email List’, click on ‘Add a new approved e-mail address’. Now, fill in that @instapaper.com email id.
- Proceed to Step 3
- Now, come back to your instapaper Kindle settings page. Make sure that the ‘Send my Unread articles to my Kindle automatically’ box is checked, and tweak the sending settings to your preferences, depending on how much you read and how often you send new articles to your instapaper queue.
All right! So at the end of Step 3, any new article you add to your instapaper reading list will automatically go to your Kindle. But right now, you’ll still have to open every article before you can send it to instapaper. The next step is the nice part – you can add interesting links you find on twitter to instapaper without opening them. Here’s that process:
- Create an ifttt.com account.
- Now, go to this link, which is an ifttt recipe which scans your new favourited tweets, and if it finds links in them, sends them to instapaper.
- You’ll now have to authorise ifttt to link to both your twitter and instapaper account. This does mean entering your passwords for both these services. Don’t panic – the password is not going to ifttt, only to twitter/ instapaper to allow them to authorise ifttt.
- Create the task. Don’t worry about the text box fields that ifttt shows you – you can leave them empty.
Note: Maybe you’d rather use Pocket or Readability instead of Instapaper. You can, and the principle is the same, but I’ve never bothered to set it up myself. You’ll have to use an ifftt recipe that links Twitter and Readability or Twitter and Pocket. Linking Readability to Kindle is easy, here’s the page to do it. Pocket, unfortunately, doesn’t send directly to Kindle, and you’ll have to use the third party en2Kindle website, adding yet another step. But if that works for you because you love Pocket, great.
Too much work!
Besides, I realised that books on Amazon are expensive-compared to Flipkart/Infibeam. So the only books I read on Kindle are the ones that are freely available on Gutenberg (and that, as you might know, is veritable and vast collection).
The Flipkart/ Kindle price difference depends on your reading list. Anything with an Indian edition is always cheaper than on Kindle, but if you’re looking for something obscure that Flipkart will only import the American edition of, Kindle is probably cheaper.
But I’ve been doing only out of copyright books myself in the month since getting my Kindle.