Following up on plans to improve document syncing for Kindle devices mentioned alongside the launch of the Kindle Scribe, Amazon quietly introduced a new ‘Send to Kindle’ web app. I discovered it via an email announcement together with various updates to file support and reading features. It’s fairly basic, but functional: a simple control for selecting local files, while the right side lists the various other ways to send documents to Kindle devices, and a link to the personal ‘Content and Devices’ saved in your Amazon account.
The big advantage I see for this method compared to previously available ones is that here you can upload multiple files at once, something that I don’t think was possible via email, and certainly not through the browser extensions and mobile apps. After uploading, there’s an option to change the Title of the document to something more suitable, and optionally to add an Author, a nice touch to better distinguish documents in the Kindle Library. I like having a direct link to the Content and Devices section, because after upload I can immediately go there and add categories to the new document, which would then sync to my Kindle; usually I don’t bother categorizing when sending documents by email or from a browser, I do that only after I’m done reading them to keep track of their status. Of course, it would be even better if Amazon would allow users to choose categories directly in this upload screen.
As for reading on the Kindle, there’s not much difference between files sent through this new web form and other methods. The only thing I noticed is that Kindle docs sent by web have a slightly different layout: they default to left-aligned text, while earlier documents had justified text, and new docs have hyphenation enabled, which was not available before as far as I know. Notes & Highlights are still not synced back to the web, or at least I didn’t discover them anywhere.
Overall, if you’re sending internet articles to the Kindle as a read-later device, an extension like Push to Kindle is still the more convenient choice, as it only takes a couple of clicks. But it’s nice to have a decent backup option for cases where extensions fail to properly extract the article text, or you want to combine longer, multi-page articles into a single document.
Post a Comment