Amazon has joined the crowd of companies trying to make it easier for people to save online content to read later, giving some Web sites a new “Send to Kindle” button that brings online articles straight to users’ e-readers and Kindle apps.
Launch partners include Boing Boing, Time and, yes, The Washington Post. Those interested in using the button can click the orange “K” icon and will be directed to sign in with their Amazon accounts. You can choose where — Kindle, iPhone app, Mac or PC app etc. — you want to send whatever you want to save and a clipped version of the Web page should show up in your Kindle library.
Amazon is letting developers have free access to the button for their own Web sites through its developers portal.
There are plenty of services that let you clip things from the Web to read later, including Instapaper, Evernote, Pocket and Readability, which all have their own unique features for organizing and accessing notes from the Web on multiple devices. Apple’s Safari browser also has a “reading list” feature that lets users keep track of sites they want to take a look at later.
On the one hand, Amazon has an advantage here if many Web sites adopt the button and allow the company to leverage its broad userbase. Even without rich organization and tagging options, that fact alone could drive use of the “Send to Kindle” button.
Google has also reportedly been working on a service that lets users save notes for later. Sharp-eyed bloggers at Android Police noticed a note-taking app called Google Keep that appeared in Google Drive briefly over the weekend — the site was quickly taken down after the blog’s report went live.
The company has experimented in the past with similar services, as TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez noted Monday, such as Google Notebook and Google Bookmark Lists, both of which were subsequently
shut down.
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