Hi,
I have seen from the way email-to-kindle scripts work, the content is fetched independently and thus when authentication is required the script can only email a ‘login required’ screen. is there a way around this? as an example-- i am a grad student and read a lot of journal articles. many are available as pdfs, but these often do not display well on my kindle-- despite efforts to crop and convert, etc. what i’d like is to be able to easily send the full text (html) version of the journal article to my free kindle address. however the content while loaded in my browser window is behind a paywall. i guess what i would like is a script that could parse the downloaded material vs the actual content on third-party server. Make sense?
Hi Doug,
Thanks for this. You’re right that Kindle It currently works by making its own request for content, and thus fails to work on pages which are not publically accessible. We do have plans to offer an alternative method which will send the contents of the page you’re viewing to our servers for processing (currently it only sends the URL of the page to our servers, and then we fetch that URL).
I’m a little wary about how we go about implementing this. Some of the other read-later, send-to-kindle services work by sending the contents of the page you’re on to their own servers for processing. I’m not very fond of this approach because I can foresee many people invoking the service by mistake and having sensitive information immediately sent to someone else’s servers (for example, imagine clicking a button that did this while viewing your bank account statement - if you do this with out extension now, it will only send a URL which reveals very little, and fetching the URL will reveal no sensitive information). Of course in your case, and we’ve had requests from others who are in a similar situation, that’s exactly what you’d want. So I’m thinking about how best to integrate something like this.
One interim solution will be to offer a simple form where users can type/paste whatever they want to send to their Kindle. That would allow users to copy and paste content that’s currently protected into this form and make it accessible to our service, without necessarily making it accessible to the world.
In the meantime, I can only suggest that you try some of the other extensions similar to ours (e.g. Readability, Send to Kindle) which I think use the alternative approach of sending the contents of the page you’re on to their servers.
Hope that’s some help.
Just a quick update to say we’ve got our experimental PastePad up and running. Articles which our service cannot access can be pasted in here and then sent for processing. It works by saving a temporary copy of the submitted content on our server so that our services can access it.
Try it at: http://pastepad.fivefilters.org
The idea of pastepad is good. However, it is currently not working with foreign languages such as Chinese characters. I tried to copy a Chinese page to it. It displayed on in the editor window but failed when the preview page. It would be great if it is fixed. Many thanks in advance.
Eddie Wong
Hi Eddie, thanks for the report. I’m going to take a look at this when I get the chance to see what we can do.
Eddie: an update to say the character encoding issue with pastepad should be fixed. Please try again and let us know if you still have trouble with non-English articles.
Update: Version 2.0 of Push to Kindle (currently in beta) now handles sending content from an authenticated page to the Kindle. More information in our blog post: https://blog.fivefilters.org/2019/10/26/push-to-kindle-2-beta.html