How to implement a "send to kindle" link?

Question

I'm trying to find out how to create a link that will send the current page/article on my site to a users Kindle device. I haven't been able to find much about it, but I know it can be done because I see it here: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL258709W/King_Henry_VI and Instapaper offers this functionality, see image. Does anyone know how to do this, or even where to start?

I've seen other posts asking this question, but they were from a while ago and at the time it wasn't possible so there were no answers, now it's possible.

Boehmenist

Answer 1

Each registered Kindle has an associated email address. Users can email documents to this address to copy them to their Kindle device and to Amazon's associated cloud storage.

However, by default only the email address associated with the user's Amazon account is whitelisted. You must ask the user to add your email address to their Approved Senders list. Once that's done you just need their Kindle email address and you're good to go.

Each Kindle email address has two variations: @kindle.com and @free.kindle.com. The @free.kindle.com will only transfer documents over Wi-Fi, so that the user is not charged. If you use the @kindle.com email address, it may instead be transfered over 3G at a cost to the user. They can configure their settings to disallow this, but you should be careful not to send documents to this address unexpectedly.

Instapaper's interface is a good example of how this could be done:

Although this has been offered to American Kindle customers for a long time, the international support has been poorer. Until recently this wasn't support in Canada at all, even for wi-fi transfers. I don't know where this is and is not currently supported.

For more details, such as the supported formats, please see the Amazon support document Kindle Personal Document Service.

Altheaalthee

That doesn't actually appear to be the mechanism that OpenLibrary is using however. They're using a URL of the form: amazon.com/gp/digital/fiona/… where IA presumably stands for "Internet Archive." Not sure if it was a special one-of deal or something that others can access. – Bolognese

Answer 2

It seems that the way to do this is to just email your @kindle.com email account with the document you want to read attached to the email.

Here's a link to Amazon's Kindle support page describing how to do this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200140600

Damon

Answer 3

As well as the email solutions mentioned above, Amazon provides a stylable “Send to Kindle” button that can be dropped into any html page. Before dropping in their Javascript snippet, you’ll need to implement one of a few methods for identifying the content area in your page i.e custom CSS selectors or schema.org notation.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/developers/button

You can see how it should work here on my site, although Amazon seem to be having some document delivery issues lately.

https://www.digitalbook.io/free-ebook.html#!/1fe895f5a2243070bbd6c01296fbbc8c/Peter%20Pan

If anyone can find a working example of this button on another site, perhaps you can provide a link here. Thanks.

Piccaninny