The eureka moment
I was scrolling through social media, as one does, when I came across a reel about the book Algorithms to Live By. It sounded interesting, so I bought it on the Kindle app. Reading it was a genuinely good experience: no notifications, no distractions, just reading.
That got me thinking I should get a physical Kindle. Best purchase I've made in years. But when I tried sending web articles to it with the tools that existed, the formatting fell apart. Images were broken, paragraphs were out of order, and the whole thing was barely readable.
The frustration
I read a lot, and I kept running into the same problem. You find a good article, send it to your Kindle, and it comes back as a jumbled mess. Paragraphs scrambled, images mangled, not what anyone would call a pleasant way to read.
I spent more time being annoyed than actually reading. That's when I thought: fine, I'll build something that works myself.
What got built
I'm not the first person to try this, but I wanted to see if I could make something that actually worked for readers like me. To Kindle takes a URL and returns a file ready for your Kindle: paste a link, get a file.
Every decision came back to one question: would this annoy me while reading. Formatting, spacing and layout got the most attention, since that's where the other tools I'd tried kept failing.
Premium now covers document uploads too: PDF, EPUB, DOCX or MOBI up to 10 MB, on top of unlimited sends and downloads. To Kindle is available as a Chrome extension, a Firefox extension, an Android app, and here on tokindle.in.
About 5k people now send their reading to their Kindle through To Kindle. I did not expect that when I started. It is still one person building and running all of it.
What's next
Being a solo developer means progress is slower than I'd like, but here's what's on my mind:
- Handle more complex websites that currently break the formatter
- Maybe manga support, still just an idea
- Let people customize how their articles look
Running this
I run this on my own, and every month there's a bill for the servers that process articles. It's not huge, but it adds up when it's one person keeping something useful running.
If To Kindle saves you time, any support helps keep the lights on. Using it and telling other people about it helps just as much.