Send Web Articles to Kindle from an iPhone with Readability

Readability is an outstanding, free web-service and mobile app for iOS and Android which permits users to read advertisement-free web content offline on multiple devices. In this post, I’ll describe how to use Readability to send a web article you want to read later to your Kindle eReader. Hat tip to Bob Sprankle who first showed Readability to me and sang it’s praises!

If you’d like to send web articles or blog posts you read on your iPhone to your Kindle with Readability, a few setup steps are required. First, of course, you’ll need to create a free account on Readability if you haven’t already. On your Readability account settings, you’ll need to add the “email to my Kindle” email address for your device. You can find and/or “set” this address by logging into kindle.amazon.com by clicking MANAGE YOUR DEVICE, and then EDIT under “Send-to-Kindle E-mail Address.”

Second, again on the website kindle.amazon.com, add the email address kindle@readability.com to your list of approved or authorized email addresses which can auto-magically add content to your Kindle. You’ll find this by clicking the sidebar link for “Personal Document Settings.”

Next, on your iPhone you’ll want to add several “bookmarklets” so you can quickly send webpages to your Kindle via Readability. These bookmarklets include some scripting code so they have to be added differently than a ‘regular’ bookmark. As described on this Readability Community Support article, the process is to:

• Copy the Javascript code
• Make a new bookmark
• Edit that bookmark to be the Javascript (instead of a link to the page)

Once you add the bookmarks, they will look something like this when you access them using the Safari browser on your iPhone. (The name will depend on what you decide to call each one.)

Now that you’ve added the bookmarks, when you have an article or blog post open in Safari on your iPhone that you want to send to your Kindle, click on your bookmarklet when you have that specific webpage open. The script will send the “code order” so the article will be pending download on your Kindle next time it’s turned on with an Internet connection.

This is a photo of my Kindle Touch after it synced, with the most recent Readability article available at the top of my documents list.

I really like the clean presentation of Readability articles on the Kindle. Contrast this with the original article screenshot, which is cluttered with a BUNCH of ads and other distractions.

Check out Readability! It’s a free service, and I love the way it now lets me “send articles for later reading” directly to my Kindle Touch. There are other ways to send articles and documents to your Kindle, but this is the slickest and most efficient way I’ve found so far.

Hat tip to Tim Lauer, who shared the article with me featured in the screenshots in this post: What A City Needs by Edward Glaeser about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.

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