So many papers and articles are only available in PDF format and I find them almost impossible to read on-line, especially if they are formatted in two columns.
I used to have dozens of the things printed-off and lying around at any one time on my coffee table, by the side of my bed, in my book case and I could never find the one I wanted when I needed it and even then they were never easy to read even on paper.
What is great about the Kindle, is that I can email my PDFs to Amazon where they convert them to the Kindle format and usually within the hour, like magic, they appear on my Kindle.
I love it. But it gets better.
I often find interesting articles on a website in HTML format. I don't want to read them there and then and I don't want to read them online or print them off with all the headers, footers and margins.
Now I can convert these pages to read on my Kindle also. Here is the process I have been using up until now:
- bookmark the page with Instapaper (Instapaper is a free web service that saves articles for later reading on web browsers, Apple iOS devices, and Amazon Kindle in a sripped-down text format.)
- later, go to the stripped-down text document in Instapaper
- print the plain text to a PDF file (I use a free printer driver called CutePDF Writer)
- save the PDF file to a folder on my laptop. I have created one called Kindle PDFs just for the purpose.
- email the file to my Kindle
I have just discovered, however, that I can configure Instapaper to send articles I have bookmarked directly to my Kindle. It will even compile several articles into one file. Now that's really cool.
