E-Commerce, eBooks, Prime Video & music even for some AWS. This is the list of items that my close surroundings say about Amazon’s domain. Kindle is mostly overlooked or not prominently known among people.
Kindle is a strange product from Amazon. Unlike its Video/music or retail site, Kindle appeals to a narrow circle - readers. Even among the readers, there is a split between ebook and physical book readers.
Firstly, it’s the only hardware product from Amazon. The hardware is not some cheap plastic. The device boasts a solid design, handy to carry around, easier to handle in a single hand. The battery is one of the key factors, once fully charged the device runs for weeks. .Secondly, unlike other products Kindle helps us to build a constructive habit - reading. Third, once you acquire Kindle you can circumvent Amazon entirely and no need to pay. The hardware superiority and goodness of reading have been covered by so many blogs. Here, I’ll explain how I’m using Kindle to use Kindle.
Availing free Books - there are several sites to get free books like - Project Gutenburg, amazon’s Prime reading, your local libraries, and so on.
Consuming Longreads through Kindle
This is one of the underrated and often overlooked capabilities of this wonder device. Kindle is optimized for reading through the built-in dictionary, bookmarking, highlighting, and eye-friendly.
How I was consuming long reads?
There are so many sites creating high-caliber long reads like the Guardian, WSJ, NYT, the Atlantic, WP, and so on. I’m susceptible to distractions and a short attention span gets me distracted while reading halfway through the sites. Adding these long-reads into the Pocket was being practiced for almost 7 years. This was working fine in the pre-pandemic year, the frequent commute was allowing me to read through the saved items. Now with the commutes becoming a farfetched dream, reading on the mobile with an active WiFi connection and frequent notifications became a tough ask.
The Pocket doesn’t have a built-in integration with Kindle, unlike Instapaper. So, 3rd party service is the way to go. We do have a service promoted by the Pocket itself - Pocket2Kindle. The restriction here is that with free service we can’t choose the article to be sent to K, or some more. The total number of articles in my backlog is north of 3500. So, a random article sent to Kindle won’t be a perfect solution.
Pocket - Kindle integration
The pocket - Kindle flow has been refreshed after some research. So, here comes the steps.
- Readruler - This is to segregate long reads from smaller articles.
- Send to Kindle from Amazon - Send web pages to Kindle. But this doesn’t work well with long reads in certain sites (like this article Psyche.co)
- Tinderizer - To email web pages to Kindle. This service overcomes the shortcomings of Send to Kindle. One downside is the articles carry the brand on the cover and the footer.
The Kindle experience
It has been a week since using Kindle to read long reads. I’m clearing an article one for a day. This is becoming a habit in the past few days and my love for Kindle has only grown.
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Page last updated on: 2024-11-06 09:30:05 +0530 +0530Git commit: a98b4d9