Kindlebility
February 5th, 2011 by 
Phil
In my attempts to find better ways of getting long-form content onto my Kindle to read offline, I’ve mainly been using two tools: Instapaper and the Later On Kindle Chrome extension.
Instapaper has great formatting, and repeated delivery works like a new issue of a periodical, but as far as I can tell, on a slightly unpredictable schedule (or at least on a schedule that is slightly inconvenient to me).
Later on Kindle sends the content pretty much instantly, which is much more useful since it means that provided I leave a few minutes to make sure it all gets processed, I can send some pages just before I leave work, and read them on the way home! The big downside is that your page ends up text-only; it doesn’t keep images in the same way that Instapaper does. Also, having it in the Chrome toolbar is very nice.
The solution for me is Kindlebility. It uses Readability to parse the page into a sensible layout (including multi-page articles), converts that to a PDF, then emails the result to your Kindle. It’s triggered by a bookmarklet, which means it can be added to any browser. Even better, it’s open source (more info in this blog post), which means that if I want to, I can avoid using any middleman at all!
Right now, this is by far the best solution I’ve come across so big thanks to Daniel Huckstep for putting it together!
Tagged: chrome, instapaper, kindle, readability | 
6 Comments »
Hey Phil!
Was just looking through my analytics and saw that some visits were coming from this post. Thanks for the kind words, and glad you enjoy it!
Posted by Daniel Huckstep on March 2nd, 2011 at 9:16 pmHi,
I keep on reading good reviews on Kindlebility, but it doesn’t seem to work for me (or it would really take ages for it to get past the first page…).
Posted by Belodalin on March 17th, 2011 at 1:30 pmAnyway, it is possible to send your Instapaper compilation to Kindle right away, whenever you want to, so what’s the point in pdf conversion? (Just asking, maybe I’m missing something.)
Are you sure your config is correct? 95% of the time, it works instantly for me.
Instapaper is two-step if you want the page on your Kindle immediately, Kindlebility is one-step. That is a compelling reason for me. The Instapaper auto-delivery has not seemed totally reliable in my experience, and delivers at an odd time of day for those of us on GMT. Also, it means you’re dependent on a closed-source, third party application (you can run your own Kindlebility if you’re that way inclined).
Posted by Phil on March 17th, 2011 at 9:36 pmI’m convinced.
But still, I can’t make it work. Email added to whitelist, address double-checked, not sure what else is to be configured… Instapaper, klip.me etc. works fine, so I’m clueless.
Posted by Belodalin on March 26th, 2011 at 11:49 amHey Belodalin,
Hit me up at the links at the bottom of http://kindlebility.darkhax.com/
I’d like to make it work for you!
Posted by Daniel Huckstep on April 11th, 2011 at 9:45 pmTry http://www.kindlethispage.com too
It was about before this one!
Posted by David on April 14th, 2011 at 2:49 pm