TECHNOLOGY

If you have a Kindle it’s a given that you love reading. Which probably means that you enjoy reading blogs and online news sources. But who has time to read every intriguing article when they run across it online?

Fear not! You can do like I did: set up your Kindle to receive your saved bookmarks automatically and then read them later at your leisure. And it’s 100% free (assuming you have a Kindle already).

Here’s how you do it:

Set up an account with Instapaper

Instapaper is a website that allows you to add a bookmarklet to your browser so you can save interesting web pages.

1. Go to instapaper.com and sign up for a free account. Be sure to use an email address that you can quickly confirm.

2. After you’ve created your free account, go to Extras (http://instapaper.com/extras) and locate the bookmarklet on that page. Drag the bookmarklet (it says “Read Later”) to your bookmark bar in your web browser. That’s at the top of your browser. If you don’t know what a bookmark bar is or what a browser is, please go to your room for a timeout.

3. Once you have the Read Later button on your bookmark bar (or Favorites bar in some browsers), you can click it when you come across any web page you’d like to, well…read later. Keep following the instructions to see where this is all going.

4. Go to Account settings in Instapaper and under “Do you use an Amazon Kindle?” select “Manage my Kindle settings”. Take note of the email address that Instapaper gives you to use to send articles to your Kindle. You’ll need to use that in the next section.

Now you’re ready to tell Amazon to allow your Kindle to receive information from Instapaper.

Get Amazon to do what you want it to do

Since you have a Kindle (any type of Kindle will do), that means by default you have an Amazon account. Whether you use it to buy eBooks or not, we need to get there to tweak a few settings. Don’t worry, all this is easy and free.

1. Open a new browser window or tab so you can have Instapaper.com and Amazon open at the same time. That will be handy.

2. In the new browser window, log on to Amazon.com.

3. Go to Account Settings > Manage your Kindle > Personal Document Settings

4. Under Approved Personal Document E-Mail List add a new approved e-mail address. The e-mail address is the address given to you by Instapaper in step #4 in the previous section.

5. While you’re on Amazon settings, retrieve the email address of your Kindle device located in “Send-to-Kindle E-Mail Settings” toward the top of the page you’re on. Copy it and paste it into the Instapaper page (Account > Manage my Kindle settings). Save these settings. You can now close Amazon.com

Set up retrieval on your Kindle through Instapaper

1. back on Instapaper, under Account > Manage my Kindle settings, go to the bottom section and check the box that says “Send my unread articles to my Kindle automatically”

2. You can also set the frequency of when you want your “Read Later” bookmarks to be sent to your Kindle. For example, you can have them delivered every day at 3 AM, or you can send them every week at Noon. Also, you may choose to have articles delivered only when a certain minimum number are in your Instapaper list.

3. Save your settings.

Once you follow these steps, you can now click your little “Read Later” button on your browser bar when you find an article that you want to read later. Each time you click the button (it’s called a bookmarklet, now you know!) you are sending that article to your Instapaper list. Then, at the frequency you’ve set up, Instapaper sends your articles to your Kindle. Your Kindle has to be online to receive the articles, of course. You’ll now have a Instapaper category on your Kindle, sorted by date. It’s sort of a digest of your favorite online articles, delivered to your to your Kindle device.

A tip: if you frequent sites that split their articles or blog posts into multiple pages, be sure to view the article as one page (most sites will offer this or a printer-friendly version) and add that to your Read Later list. Otherwise you’ll only get the one page you on and miss out on the x number of other pages.

I hope you find this tutorial useful. Please ask any questions or post comments below.

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