Today I was listening to Episode #81 of the Kindle Chronicles. It was especially interesting to me for three reasons:

1. James McQuivey’s analysis of the Amazon/Macmillan dispute
2. Len gave tips about using the great Instapaper service with one’s Kindle and
3. Len mentioned me by name to reference this post on my thought experiment.

In the show, Len discussed the options in Instapaper to email documents to a Kindle but there is another way I’ll discuss shortly.

To back up, Instapaper is a great service that lets you mark long form articles to be read later. I have a bookmarklet in all my browsers that with a single click and mark any page as such. The service is good and seems to handle multipage articles pretty well.

If you are already a user of Calibre (and I suggest everyone serious about using e-reader devices should be), there is another option. Calibre already has functionality under the “Fetch News” option to pull down and create documents with a simple scripting language. There are a few hundred built in sources and the ability for you to create our own pretty simply, and then a scheduler to set up how often this news source is fetched.

Click the “Fetch News” button in the toolbar of Calibre. You can either type “Instapaper” in the search box, or navigate to the “Unknown” category at the bottom of the list and select “Instapaper.com”. Click the “Scheduled for Downloads” checkbox, select the frequency or schedule that you want to have it fetched. Below, enter your username (email address) and your password on the service. It’s that simple. Now, when Calibre fetches the news from Instapaper, it will assemble all of your “Unread” items into a document and also tell Instapaper to move those articles into the “Read” category so you don’t repeatedly fetch them.

I’ve had it set up this way for a few months now and really like it. If I see a blog post or link to an article that I’d like to read but is longer than I have time for currently, I hit the Instapaper “Read Later” bookmarklet and forget about it. At a future time, Calibre will fetch it and then it will automatically get moved to my Kindle and I’ll have it there to read – typically on the orbital trainer at the gym. It’s a nice, seamless way to keep from letting these longer articles drop through the cracks.

Update: I can see Len Edgerly has kindly linked to this blog post from the most recent Kindle Chronicles and will use this tip on a future show. Via email, he asked me a few days ago what the advantage is to this over having Instapaper just email it directly to you Kindle. My response in part was that I’m not sure I’d consider it an advantage per se. It’s just a different mode of interaction. I almost never email anything to my Kindle, and I do use Calibre as the central point in my book management, equivalently how you might use iTunes with music. All books from here on go into Calibre first for me, and from there to my Kindle or whatever future device I might have. Whether Gutenberg or any other DRM free source, I tend to get ePub and convert from there.

After I emailed Len I did think of some more explicit advantages. If one has a few different devices (like Len does) that you use interchangeably, whichever device you connect will automatically get the newest news content transferred to it. This means that you could hook your Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader et al to it shortly before you walk out the door and you’ll get the Instapaper document. It removes the Kindle specificity and makes it more of a total ecosystem tool.

In my case, I’m such a cheapskate that I’m not going to pay $0.15 per Instapaper push. I have to plug the Kindle up to charge it, so I just get the news when that happens. Different strokes for different folks.

Tags: calibre, instapaper, kindle, kindlechronicles, lenedgerly

Today was a particularly good day in my podcast queue. Here is the highlights of things I particularly enjoyed:

Within the last month I’ve recently started listening to The Kindle Chronicles podcast. Those podcasters who worry about soundproofing their rooms, try listening to Len Edgerly when his big ass grandfather clock starts chiming midnight. You might not need it as much as you think! Episode #79 featured a particularly good interview with Seth Harwood. I am one of the people who picked up his book A Long Way from Disney last December when he had his post-Xmas special. I liked this interview and think that Seth is a good example of a hybrid new-school/old-school writer. I recommend this series and this episode.

I’ve listened to every episode of the SModcast from the beginning (with the exception of the live show episodes that I had to skip.) My single favorite one ever is episode #103 with his mother Grace, where they get stoned together and tell tales of New Jersey. There’s a point towards the end where Kevin starts cracking his mother up until she gets hysterical. It’s very funny and also kind of sweet. It just made me a little happier to listen to it. Also, I agree with his commentor that says that his mom and Walt Flanagan sound the same. I thought exactly the same thing.

I’ve also listened to every single episode of the Rock and Roll Geek Show. I’m a lifer on that one with my buddy Michael Butler. In episode #387 he has an interview with Tappy Wright, who was the road manager for The Animals, Jimi Hendix and many more that he writes about in Rock Roadie. It’s a fascinating interview and includes Wright’s claim about how Hendrix was murdered. I recommend this for a listen along with every other of the nearly 400 shows.

For five years, I’ve been claiming one of the best upsides of podcasting is the feasibility of doing a show for a niche audience. One example of that in my subscription list is the Flash-back podcast. The episode I listened to today covers Blackest Night: Flash #2. This program covers the various Flash related comic books in excruciating detail. I’m talking panel by panel, friends. Every show is like a master’s thesis in the Flash family. This is not the sort of thing that is for everybody, but for certain obsessed fans of this character (such as myself) it is really and truly awesome.

Tags: flashbackpodcast, kevinsmith, kindlechronicles, podcasting, rock and roll geek, seth harwood, smodcast, tappy wright