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Clean Your Desk with the Amazon Kindle 2
My wife is an avid reader. From her book group novels to New York Times bestsellers, she LOVES to read. So having a Kindle 2 is a natural for her. She can download books on the fly, can carry it in her purse, and can pick up right where she left off without fuddling with a bookmark.
Me, on the other hand, I do not read very much. As an engineer, most of my reading is work related, e-mail or technical articles. These are very short in nature so having a Kindle which holds thousands of novels really didn’t impress me. What does impress me is that I can use it to store my pdf’s.
So the question is now that we have a Kindle do I use it? Yes, I am surprised to say that I do use it.
Most of the articles I read are either on the web or in print. Many of these articles are available in pdf format, which is supported on the Kindle 2. I have found that I can use InstaPaper to send many of my web articles to the Kindle to read at my leisure. The pdf feature alone makes the Kindle worth its weight (10.3 oz) in gold.
An added benefit of the Kindle’s pdf feature is that it can actually help you declutter your office. Before the Kindle, I would continually print out pdf’s knowing someday that I will read them. Not only was I wasting paper by doing this, I never seemed to get the time to read all of them. They just ended up piling up on my desk. Now my reports, whitepapers and articles are no longer printed and sitting in a pile. They’re all patiently waiting for me on my Kindle.
InstaPaper and the Kindle 2.0
Got “InstaPaper”? 
News of this handy website/service is quickly sweeping through the social media avenues. Basically, Instapaper is a site that will collect all of the web articles and posts you mark and want to come back to later. Have a blog post you want to read but don’t have time right now? Send it to the Instapaper site. Find a great article you want to read on your next train ride? Keep it at Instapaper. When you have time to catch up on your readings, you can access Instapaper using your pc, your web-enabled phone, or your Kindle.
Do I have your attention yet? Yes, send your favorite web articles to your Kindle using Instapaper.
I should tell/forewarn you that the site is in beta so keep that in mind with all of this. Things might not work perfectly and their site is still very “plain Jane”… but it delivers a great service! Be beta forewarned!
The process is actually very simple.
- Go to the InstaPaper site and register
- Drag the little “Read Later” button up into your bookmarks toolbar
- When you’re on a different website and find something you want to save, click the “Read Later” button you just put into your toolbar and it will save it for you.
Ready for the Kindle magic?
After setting up your Amazon supplied Kindle email account to accept the Instapaper articles (follow Instapaper directions here), you can choose to have InstaPaper send (via the Amazon supplied Kindle email ) the articles you saved to your Kindle for your reading pleasure wherever you go.
Your delivery can be set up to automatically arrive to your Kindle on a daily or weekly plan. You can also send articles to your Kindle email on demand by going to the InstaPaper site. See the InstaPaper site for details.
Handy Tip: You can highlight a line of the article text before hitting the “Read Later” button and the text you highlighted will become the item’s description in your InstaPaper article list