Instapaper, Kindle Edition

For my breakfast this morning at Eggbert’s, I decided to opt out of the increasingly sparse print edition of the Tulsa World.  Instead, I took both my Kindle and my iPhone with me.

After scanning the Tulsa World headlines on my iPhone via their mobile site, I opened up my Kindle and activated its web browser to read some online articles I’d save with the marvelous Instapaper site, which I’ve written about before.  But for some reason I couldn’t login to Instapaper via the Kindle’s primitive web browser.  I’d already been disappointed in how the Kindle browser was rendering the new icon design of Instapaper, and now this.

But I wasn’t about to give up on Instapaper, which has been so incredibly useful to me.  So I pulled out my iPhone, started its Instapaper app, and used it to read Jerry Pournelle’s latest Chaos Manor column.  The iPhone is great for reading articles when I don’t have my Kindle with me, but its cramped screen really slows down my reading.

This evening I decided to look into what was amiss with using Instapaper on my Kindle, and was delighted to discover that Instapaper now has native Kindle support.  You can have a digest of your saved Instapaper articles emailed automagically to your Kindle and then browse through them like a book, which is even more convenient than accessing them via the Kindle’s web browser.

You have to configure your Kindle account to accept emails from Instapaper and provide Instapaper with your Kindle’s email address.  Then digests of your saved articles can be sent to your Kindle, each one complete with a hyperlinked table of contents.  This is far more convenient than logging in through the Kindle browser and bouncing back and forth between the saved articles and the Instapaper website’s index.  And, to top  it off, the Kindle’s rendering of the articles in this format is far better than its web browser’s rendition of them.

Amazon will charge you 10 cents to convert and upload each emailed digest from Instapaper, but even if you sent yourself a daily update, that would only amount to $3.10 per month at most.  And Instapaper let’s you send updates daily or weekly, and delay updates until a set number of unread entries have built up.

Hooray for Marco Arment, who has added great value to my Kindle, my iPhone, and my web experience in general.  Instapaper just keeps getting better.