[DJ Edwardson]

I didn't see this posted anywhere else so I thought I'd share a cool new thing that Amazon just released that you can add to your blog or website. It's the 'Send to Kindle' button. It will allow anyone who reads your site to file it away for later to read on their Kindles. It's not a game changer, but it's a great little tool for authors to add an extra feature to our web pages and show our Kindle readers a little extra love.

You can check out the announcement on Amazon's forums here:

http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdThread=Tx3VOEYX7KVPNUG

In the past you could do this but you needed a browser plugin-in. They've made it much, much easier to do now so that the reader doesn't have to do anything. You just have to add it to your site.

If you'd like to see it in action, I've already added it to my web page.

http://www.djedwardson.com/if-you-have-a-kindle/

Besides blog posts, now you can post short stories, excerpts, and other things you've written and let readers read them on their Kindles for a much more enjoyable reading experience.

I'm using wordpress and it was very easy to install the plugin, activate it, and then in the settings say whether I wanted it on Posts, all Pages, etc. And you can even style the button a bit from the settings and tell it whether you want it to appear at the top or the bottom of the page.

Here's the link to the wordpress plugin page:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/send-to-kindle/

Anyway, take advantage of this new feature and see what you think.

 

[Ardin]

Nice, thanks for the tip.

 

[Guest]

FYI DJ: Your site is not playing nice with the McAfee antivirus installed on my work computer. It's blocked as a 'spam url'. I doubt it is actually anything with your site, since McAfee is prone to block the most mundane stuff, but sometimes it picks up innocent keywords and construes them in bizarre fashions.

I have a question: if someone clicks the button, does it automatically buy the item or just take them to the Amazon page? I would worry about people clicking the link thinking they are just previewing and buying by accident.

 

[Leslie]

FYI DJ: Your site is not playing nice with the McAfee antivirus installed on my work computer. It's blocked as a 'spam url'. I doubt it is actually anything with your site, since McAfee is prone to block the most mundane stuff, but sometimes it picks up innocent keywords and construes them in bizarre fashions.

I have a question: if someone clicks the button, does it automatically buy the item or just take them to the Amazon page? I would worry about people clicking the link thinking they are just previewing and buying by accident.

It's not sending books, it's sending content from the webpage you are looking at. I often send long articles from the New York Times magazine to my Kindle to read at a later date.

The content is only delivered by WiFi (not 3G, even if you have a 3G Kindle) so there isn't a sending charge. If you are not in an area with WiFi, the content won't be delivered until you get back to a WiFi place.

I think Send to Kindle is great and I use it a lot. It warranted a couple of pages of discussion in that book I'm holding in my avatar.

L

 

[Guest]

It's not sending books, it's sending content from the webpage you are looking at. I often send long articles from the New York Times magazine to my Kindle to read at a later date.

The content is only delivered by WiFi (not 3G, even if you have a 3G Kindle) so there isn't a sending charge. If you are not in an area with WiFi, the content won't be delivered until you get back to a WiFi place.

I think Send to Kindle is great and I use it a lot. It warranted a couple of pages of discussion in that book I'm holding in my avatar.

L

OK, I wasn't clear on that when I was looking at the Amazon link. That makes sense now.

 

[DJ Edwardson]

FYI DJ: Your site is not playing nice with the McAfee antivirus installed on my work computer.

Julie, thanks for letting me know that my site is giving your troubles. I wish I knew what was causing it so I could fix it, but it's a pretty standard Wordpress site, hosted by my web provider so maybe there is something they are doing on the backend or, as you say, keywords I'm using. Or maybe it's the Send to Kindle button itself?

I'll do some digging around to see if I can figure it out. I'd hate to think people are getting warning messages when visiting my site.

 

[Barbara Morgenroth]

A writer pal told me about this last week.  I use it to send my Word document in progress to my kindle.  It's formatted in the process and I can check over my work each night as it would appear to a customer.  It's very handy.

 

[Guest]

*****, thanks for letting me know that my site is giving your troubles. I wish I knew what was causing it so I could fix it, but it's a pretty standard Wordpress site, hosted by my web provider so maybe there is something they are doing on the backend or, as you say, keywords I'm using. Or maybe it's the Send to Kindle button itself?

I think it is unfortunately a problem specific to the business edition of McAfee that gets used where I work. It flags all sorts of weird stuff. I was once visiting a website for one of our consumer product clients to pull some data sheets off the site. I clicked on the Oral Care link to find the toothpaste pages and got a warning that the site was flagged for sexual content. The software was definitely using a different meaning of "oral" than I was!

 

[DJ Edwardson]

A writer pal told me about this last week.

Hmm...the Amazon forum post was dated March 19th, 4pm. I'm surprised people knew about this before then or I wonder if we're all talking about the same thing. Either way, glad you guys are able to sling stuff back and forth between Kindles and the web.

I think it is unfortunately a problem specific to the business edition of McAfee that gets used where I work.

Yeah, sometimes anti-virus software can be an example of the old adage "the cure is worse than the disease."

 

[Ann in Arlington]

This isn't all that new.  There has been a 'send to kindle' extension for Chrome and Firefox both for some time, that will do that with, generally, any web page. I use it periodically.  There's also the 'original Send to Kindle' which is an applet that works with the right click menu for compatible documents on your computer.

Perhaps, though, they've made it a widget like the facebook/twitter links a lot of web pages have.

 

[Steve Vernon]

Great tip.

 

[CoraBuhlert]

Thanks for the hint. Just added the button/plug-in to my personal and publisher blog.

 

[Gina Black]

Got it! Thanks.