Show HN: I built a tool to help you read Hacker News on Kindle

[longnguyen]

Hi HN, I'm Daniel Nguyen. In June, I quit my job to start indie hacking full-time.

The idea of KTool first came to my mind when I was reading "Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?"[0]

I've been wearing glasses since I was 5. My right eye is basically blind. Doctors said there is no chance to cure it.

I was genuinely scared. Like holy shit, if my left eye stops working, my life is done. Since then I've been very conscious about time spent on computer screens.

That's when I started using Kindle-related products: to offload as many reading materials as possible to the Kindle. I was a happy customer of Push to Kindle. Great product!

Then I ran into multiple limitations which led me to build KTool: a tool to send anything online to Kindle. Blog posts, Twitter threads, Hacker News discussions, RSS, newsletters... you name it.

But I'm not here to pitch my vision for KTool.

I built a specific tool to help you send HN discussions to your Kindle. And in the spirit of Show HN, it doesn't require an account. If you don't own a Kindle, there is the option to download the EPUB.

Let me know what you think. Any feedback will be much appreciated.

If you're a Kindle owner and you read a lot of online content, give KTool a try.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22918980

[Abishek_Muthian]

Hi Daniel,

Congratulations on the launch!

I received an email from HN user telling me about this post because a while back I was running 'HN to Kindle' service[0] and since Amazon enabled 2FA for bulk emails even for approved email ids I lost motivation to run it further and instead made the core application open-source[1].

Since you're sending HN item individually, I'm not sure whether you'll face the 2FA block but do monitor whether your users are getting your emails delivered by connecting with them.

Your website's presentation is way better than mine, Perhaps because you've put JS to good use. Feel free to use my code to implement other features like classification according to chosen topics if you'd like it.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20220216140431/https://hntokindl...

[1] https://github.com/abishekmuthian/hntoebook

[longnguyen]

Thank you for your work!

Yeah I haven't run into the 2FA issue yet, but probably will. Is there any docs about this 2FA issue I can read (other than the short doc on amazon.com)?

Thanks,

[mft_]

Hi Daniel

First, I love what you've done here, and why - congratulations on making it this far!

A few suggestions:

1) An independent web route is important, but you could lower the friction even further with browser plugins. Like you, for general articles I use push-to-kindle[0] which only needs two clicks - no copy/paste, etc.

2) Have you also thought about including a copy of the original article - so that in a single download, there's the article followed by the HN discussion, all accessible from the document's index?

3) I could see this developing further as a productivity tool via subscription - maybe I set up an account with you and then receive a digest of the day's top-10 (or 20, whatever) articles and discussions. Or a weekly digest? Might be a powerful way to divert people away from the regular distraction of HN, but still allow consumption.

Good luck :)

[0] https://www.fivefilters.org/push-to-kindle/

[longnguyen]

Thanks for your valuable feedback.

1. I've actually developed that[0]. Using the browser extension is even more powerful as it could send content behind paywalls to Kindle — something not possible for the web UI.

The reason I didn't mention it is it requires an account, probably not a good thing for a Show HN.

2. Yes. I'm not sure if that's a useful feature, but personally, I don't like it. I want the original article to be a separate ebook so highlights & notes go into the correct entry. But that's an interesting feature for sure. Probably will make it a user preference.

3. Yes! That's 100% on my road map. And not just for HN. I got beta support for newsletters now but it doesn't work with a digest-type newsletter.

Thank you again!

[0]: https://ktool.io/install

[Bluecobra]

I'm in a similar situation as as you in that I wear glasses and have busted right eye due to eye muscle surgery in the early 1980s. I can "see" out of it but reading text is impossible unless it's like a foot tall. The thought of avoiding screens never occurred to me. Wouldn't any medium be it a screen, paper book, or Kindle cause eye strain on your left eye? I've seen many optometrists/ophthalmologists over the years and nobody recommended to avoid screens. One doctor advised me to avoid using contacts since eyeglasses always give you eye protection for the left eye and that was it.

[longnguyen]

Oh, I didn't know that using contacts is not advisable. Thank you. Between doing a LASIK and using contacts, I was leaning toward the latter. But now probably will just wear glasses.

I find computer screens cause more eye strain than Kindle.

Yeah, I don't think we can avoid screens completely. I just wanted to offload some of the reading to the Kindle. So I could read outside more.

[colincooke]

I love the idea, and would consider paying for this after a nice trial period. I love my kindle and it has radically changed how much I read, I used to read maybe 2-3 books a year, now it's more like 2-3 books a month. I find the E-ink screen and "low techness" of it the most appealing. I'm really looking forward to using this for things other than books.

[tcmart14]

I was skeptical of screen readers until the Kindle e-ink. Have some OLED or LCD screen that you find on the standard tablets like some of the original Barnes and Nobles Nooks was just not appealing or comfortable. e-ink screens have definitely been a value on on my personal appeal on them, especially the Kindle's backlit ones.

[Bakary]

Thanks for making this. This type of software makes e-ink much more usable.

I also suggest trying Android e-ink readers from companies such as Hisense or Onyx Boox as they've come a long way in the last few years. (Not affiliated with them, just a bit obsessive on the topic)

With the upcoming generation of color e-ink and large companies starting to notice (Apple, Huawei) it's only going to get better and better moving forward.

[wiseowise]

> Onyx Boox

No way I’m going to support company like that.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/hsn7kx/onyx_usin...

[criddell]

Onyx has had problems complying with the GPL in the past. Have they fixed that?

[password4321]

> my vision for KTool

I see what you did there.

Didn't Amazon tighten up how custom content is delivered to Kindles fairly recently, requiring 2FA? So you need to connect the Kindle to load the content?

[longnguyen]

Haha, the pun wasn't intended.

So far I haven't run into the 2FA issue yet. I made sure the email configuration was correct (all those SPF, DKIM, DMARC kinds of stuff) and the KTool email was added to their Approved email address list.

[lolinder]

I don't think so. Not too long ago I was able to send an EPUB to my Kindle by sending it to a kindle email address from an "approved" sender.

Here's the help article describing that process: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId...

[oidar]

I just signed up for a year to try it out. A few things: 1) The way you get the kindle email address is slick, but some people might get squicked out from a privacy standpoint because you are scraping information from a logged in Amazon account. Perhaps present an obvious option for the user to input the kindle email address. 2) There is no share functionality with the iOS app - I understand that there is an extension in safari itself, but I should be able to pass the app via the share button - this is how all these kind of services do this (P2K, Share to Kindle, Evernote, Joplin, Dropbox, Day One - etc.) You are the first service to use a safari extension to share webpages that I have come across. The upside of using the share functionality, is that any browser can access your service - not just safari users. 3) Cleaning up documents on the Kindle is a PIA. Consider bundling - or giving the option to bundle them into a "book". Maybe two options - add to my periodic (weekly/daily) "book" and another option to send an article immediately. 4) Most people are not going to spend 50 bucks for an annual subscription to try something out for a bit - consider offering monthly subscriptions. Hope this helps!

[longnguyen]

Wow that's a GREAT feedback. Thank you a lot. Please find my answers below:

1) You are right. I build KTool with privacy in mind and I've thought about this. There is always the option to set it up manually[0][1] but probably it wasn't obvious. I'm open to any UX suggestion here.

I should mention that the KTool extension doesn't require any special permission, unlike Instapaper which asking to access your webpages _all the time_[2]. KTool cannot access the web pages you visit until you click on the extension icon and perform an action.

2) Yeah and the instructions for the iOS extension is not even clear. I developed it for some of my paying customers and haven't paid much attention yet. Thanks for the feedback.

PS: don't listen to the Internet. The new Web Extension is not better than building a Share Extension.

3) Great idea. Will implement that next.

4) There is always the monthly subscription option[2] and this UI/UX is pretty common among SaaS. I'm not sure how can I make it more obvious. Again, any UX suggestion is welcome.

[0]: https://share.cleanshot.com/AOk1Ii

[1]: https://share.cleanshot.com/wLrjRh

[2]: https://twitter.com/daniel_nguyenx/status/155730594021050368...

[3]: https://share.cleanshot.com/sqrUzZ

[nabaraz]

I use Amazon's official extension to send webpages to Kindle all the time. [1]

My feedback: I can't justify paying $4/month to be able to send few packaged webpages to my kindle, If this was a one time payment of ~$20, I'd be interested.

[1]. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/send-to-kindle-for...

[longnguyen]

Thanks for your feedback and I'm glad that the official extension works well for you. All I can say is you probably are not my target customers.

Most of the time, the official extension doesn't work for me. And I'm not alone. You can check their recent reviews[0]. A lot of 1 star.

I'm aware that there are other alternatives such as Push to Kindle, P2K, Instapaper, newslettertokindle etc. They provide much better conversion quality than the official extension, and better deliverability. I'm confident that KTool is on par with them, maybe better in some use cases (such as Twitter threads, HN, sending pdfs...). And their paid plans range from $2.99/mo to $10/mo.

What I'm doing at KTool is to support all those content in a single subscription.

I hate subscriptions, but until we found a better model, I can't sell it as one time payment. My expense is recurring (CPU for parsing & image processing, email + bandwidth to send articles to Kindle, Apple developer program, core parser maintenance as sites structure changes...)

But I will definitely do more experiment with pricing though.

Again, thanks for your valuable feedback. Much appreciated

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/send-to-kindle-for...

[dchuk]

I have to say, your setup process for your chrome extension is very slick. I look forward to giving this thing a shot, I use Pocket to save articles but it's kind of just a junk drawer for me, and I'd prefer to force myself to read from my Kindle anyway vs my iPad so I don't get distracted easily.

[jeffbee]

The blurred-out notice makes it seem like some form of scam. I would rework the site to present the entire process to potential sign-ups on first glance.

[longnguyen]

I never thought of it. Thank you!

[xena]

Do you have a way for me to demo the RSS support? I'd love to have a calm technology flow for reading articles on my kindle and I think ktool may just be what I'm looking for.

[longnguyen]

Currently, KTool doesn't support RSS yet. I will work on RSS next. I do have beta support for newsletter though, if you wanted to read Stratechery or Substack newsletters.

[nik5]

I read lot of blogs, made something similar [0] a while ago. Write now installing it is painful, if you don't have calibre or node js installed. Re-writing it all in nodejs, so that installation is easier. Calibre is not needed now, as amazon started converting epubs to azw3.

[0] https://github.com/nikhil1raghav/kindle-send

[cgb223]

As a professional platform builder, I’m always amazed at how good of a piece of hardware Amazon has made, with how limited it’s platform experience is

Kindles can only (easily) do what Amazon wants it to do —full stop.

It’s like the iPhone before the App Store.

I bet Amazon would make a massive amount of money if they opened up their ecosystem to let others develop on top of it

[criddell]

I bet it wouldn't move the needle. Their books/Kindle ratio might even drop. Although I know my Kindle is really a computer, I don't want it to act like one. I want a dedicated and narrowly focused ereader.

If I were head of that division at Amazon, I'd remove bluetooth, APIify the bookstore (so you can buy books from other retailers), remove GoodReads integration, and direct the hardware people to focus on battery life and the software people to focus on layout and typography. I'd also add a physical switch to enable/disable the touchscreen. All Kindles would have physical page turn buttons like the Oasis does.

[donio]

They have done just that with their Android based non-eink Kindle Fire line. They run their own app store and it's not great. Imagine having all the junk of the Play market but with most of the good stuff missing. The only reason I use mine is because it's possible to install the F-Droid and Play apks so you can use it more or less like a regular Android tablet.

I use my regular e-ink kindle 100% offline, I never turn off airplane mode. I only load content via USB using the Calibre CLI. I don't want my Kindle to do cool stuff. I used to think I did, I rooted my early Kindles and tried to do as much on them as possible. But then I realized that it's only a distraction from the one thing the Kindle is actually good at: reading long static text documents.

[protonbob]

In fact, they used to allow people to create apps for the Kindle, but they took away that ability later.

[azinman2]

When I saw this I was hoping for something that was more about the articles themselves as well as the main page. Would love to have an e-reader experience in the morning versus use my phone.

[longnguyen]

That's interesting. I will add that feature next.

Meanwhile, you can sign up for an account and send articles using the main product (the browser extension).

[SnooSux]

> In June, I quit my job to start indie hacking full-time.

What has that been like?

[longnguyen]

A lot of self-doubt haha. I got a decent savings so I don't have much financial pressure yet. Also the Twitter indie hacker community is super supportive. That helps a lot.

[catchmeifyoucan]

I like this! I was wondering if this also sends the articles from HN, not just the comments. It'd be game changing to wake up and read the news on my Remarkable.

[longnguyen]

Thanks. Yes, but you need to sign up for an account to send articles though.

[johnthescott]

welcome to the monkey house, dan.

combining HN and kindle is intriguing. my most serious work occurs laying in bed reading, before falling asleep. i will surely follow your work.

[testmasterflex]

I’m curious. Do you consider reading your most important work? What’s your occupation?

[jhoelzel]

Nice! i often wished for this before a flight, but it would need to include the article and comments in offline mode =)

[novantadue]

Not related, but I came up with a workaround to add scrolling for Kindle on Desktop. Kindle doesn't support scrolling on their desktop app -- they only allow page-by-page reading for some wacky reason. Workaround is to install "Windows Subsystem for Android", then read it on the kindle app inside the subsystem.

[futhey]

Been using this for a few months, really solid replacement for Amazon's own send-to-kindle, with a lot of potential.

[longnguyen]

Thanks for your continued support!