Read articles (e.g. Medium) on Kindle?

[Micael Jarniac]

Hi!

One of the reasons I purchased my Kindle for was reading articles, and well, I couldn't find a good way of doing that yet.

Most of the articles I read are from Medium, and I do have a subscription to it. Other sources would be cool too, but Medium is what I use the most.

And I mostly read articles about programming, so they often have code blocks in their body, like so:

class Micael:
    def __init__(self):
        self.__can_code = False

And sometimes even embedded GitHub Gists.

I wanted to be able to send articles to my Kindle from my browser/computer and from my phone.

I have the Medium app on my Android smartphone, and it'd be awesome to send articles directly from the app to my Kindle.

---

Here are some things I tested:

• Send to Kindle (for Google Chrome) by Amazon
• Instapaper + its Chrome extension
• Tinderizer bookmarklet
• Push to Kindle and its Android app by FiveFilters
• SENDtoREADER

And from my experimenting, they all have their drawbacks.

Take this article for example: You’re living in 1985 if you don’t use Docker for your Data Science Projects

Send to Kindle (Amazon)
On Send to Kindle, the second item from "Requirements" disappears, as well as the entire second half of the article.

Instapaper
On Instapaper, if I first visit the article and then click on the extension, it does seem to grab the article correctly, with only the last paragraph missing, but that's kinda the "thanks for reading" part, so it doesn't matter as much.

However, if I add the link directly to Instapaper, only parts of the first paragraph show up, so it seems like I do have to manually visit every article I want to add.

Another "problem" I have with Instapaper is that it's a "read it later" app, and, well, the name says it, it's usually for reading things later. If I want to send something on the spot, to read it now, I either have to go through the settings and manually tell it to "send articles now", or have their premium plan that includes the "Send to Kindle" bookmarklet, whatever that might be. I haven't tested that one yet.

Tinderizer
Tinderizer heavily messes up the formatting, the code blocks, totally gets rid of the "Requirements" section, and also gets rid of the second half of the article.

Push to Kindle (FiveFilters)
Push to Kindle does a nearly perfect job, missing only the indentation inside the code block, but that'll likely be fixed soon!

It also has an Android app that can be used to send an article directly from the Medium app, and it works very well.

SENDtoREADER
Pretty much the same as Tinderizer too.

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So far, Instapaper through the Chrome extension was the best one, but not quite ideal yet.

I've heard an alternative to Instapaper could be Pocket, but I don't think it has the Kindle support Instapaper has. From my research, it seems that to integrate ("integrate") Pocket with the Kindle, one would have to use a third-party app, like IFTTT, to fetch articles saved in Pocket, then beam them to the Kindle, or something like P2K, that's also a third-party service, but I haven't tested that yet.

The ideal scenario would be as follows:

1. Micael is browsing articles, either on his phone or on his computer
2. Micael sees an article he'd like to read
3. Micael presses a button (be it the "share" button, or an extension in the browser)
4. Micael pulls out his Kindle and the article is there, ready to be read

I'm willing to subscribe to a paid service, if that's the only way, but I can't pay much. I'm already subscribing to Medium, and I don't have much left to spend after purchasing my Kindle.

So I wanted to know which services you use, which ones you've tested, how is your article reading workflow, and so on.

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Edits:

• 2020-08-25
  • My Kindle is jailbroken, so if there's a method that requires it, I'm already set!
  • Added SENDtoREADER
• 2020-08-26
  • Push to Kindle just informed me they've updated their service, and it now does a much better job!
• 2020-08-27
  • I just purchased the Push to Kindle app, and it works pretty well for sending from the Medium app on Android.

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This post on Gist.

[tomsem]

*Ordinarily, if you have an iPhone or iPad, I would just use the Send To Kindle feature that is built in to the Kindle app. Most things can be sent using Share from whatever app you are using (Safari, News etc.) and then picking Kindle.

However I just tried it with a Medium article and it did not work, either from the Medium app or when viewing the same article with Safari.

It may be some limitation with what the Medium app shares (probably just an URL), and with Safari, it may be that Medium web page design is inscrutable to Send to Kindle. Also possible Kindle app has regression in this functionality, I generally don’t use it to Kindle-ize web pages.

I would check out calibre also. It has plugins that scrape web pages and convert them to your preferred ebook format. There might be one that deals with Medium specifically, and if it doesn’t it might be possible to create one that does. You might need to know a little Python to do that.

[Micael Jarniac]

Originally Posted by tomsem

You might need to know a little Python to do that.

You kept the best part for last! My daily job is working with Python, so I'll try that out. I'm not very experienced with Python (pretty much learned it this year), but I do think I might be able to pull something out.

I did search for a "Medium" plugin inside calibre, but couldn't find one for it. I'll search a bit more, and maybe search for generic web scrapers, so I can at least have something to build upon.

I had no idea calibre plugins could be written in Python.

[fivefilters]

Originally Posted by Micael Jarniac

Push to Kindle (FiveFilters)
Push to Kindle does only slightly better than Tinderizer, but it's nearly as bad.

Hi Micael, just thought I'd mention that we've updated Push to Kindle extraction for Medium articles. It might take a few hours for the changes to take effect, but you can try with the link below:

https://pushtokindle.fivefilters.org...db0082?nocache

We do have extraction rules specifically for Medium articles, but we check to see if medium.com is the hostname in the URL to apply them. Because this is a custom domain, those weren't getting applied. We now also look for clues in the HTML to trigger the Medium-specific extraction.

Code blocks can be harder to preserve correctly, depending on how they're marked up. In this case it uses a pre tag combined with other HTML elements, so you end up losing the indenting in our processed version - something we need to look into.

Feel free to give it another try if you like.

[Micael Jarniac]

That is awesome, thank you very much!

I've checked the preview, and other than the indentation inside the code block, everything looks about perfect!

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by Micael Jarniac

I had no idea calibre plugins could be written in Python.

Good news then: Calibre is a Python program, so Calibre plugins must be written in Python.

[marvin_2]

Originally Posted by Micael Jarniac

I did search for a "Medium" plugin inside calibre, but couldn't find one for it. I'll search a bit more, and maybe search for generic web scrapers, so I can at least have something to build upon.

I had no idea calibre plugins could be written in Python.

Calibre has a "fetch news" feature for converting web sites to ebooks. Not sure if someone has written a script for medium yet.

The calibre community has a forum here on mobileread. They are a helpful bunch if you have questions or need help should you decide to write code.