Show HN: Send books to your Kindle through Dropbox
kindlebox.meInteresting project.
I just email them to my kindle thought. http://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email
This project seems to make this much easier especially if you dumping multiple books or sharing books on dropbox already with friends
Interesting--I was considering getting a Kindle but wasn't sure of an easy way to get my non-Amazon ebook collection over to it. This looks pretty simple given I already have them in my Dropbox account which I use on my iPad to push to the iBooks app.
In terms of the Kindle's ability to handle PDFs, does it allow for resizing the page? Or is it pretty important to get the PDF page sizes "kindle-sized" to have a hope of reading it without a magnifying glass?
Hey, thanks for the interest!
In my experience, I've found that the Kindle can convert PDFs pretty well as long as there is extractable text that's not too weirdly formatted (as a cursory test, try viewing a PDF and highlighting words. If you can do it, it's probably okay to convert). Otherwise, it's true that you'll probably run into sizing issues :(
Is this like creating an ifttt.com recipe, you look for files in a folder and email them to the Kindle?
https://ifttt.com/recipes/17578-if-stored-in-kindle-dropbox-...
Kindlebox is a nicer way to do it if that is all someone wants, something I would send to my mom instead of teaching her how to use ifttt.com.
Similar idea, but not implemented with IFTTT (it uses the Dropbox API directly). Thanks for the kind comments! :)
Stopped at step #3 of the activation process.
Amazon took me to my country's Amazon site. From there, the snippet button did not work. Also I could not get the precise action behind: "pick your Kindle devices, and you're good to go". So I stopped right there.
Hey, sorry to hear you're having trouble.
The snippet scrapes the Amazon site for information about your Kindle devices. It's possible that it's failing because of different Amazon UIs depending on the country. There should be a message letting you know that it failed.
Make sure you're on the Amazon site when you click the snippet. If it's successful, there should be a list of devices that you "pick" by clicking the names. Once you click the "Activate Kindlebox", that should be it.
Please email me at swang93@mit.edu if you're still having trouble!
Hi, Unfortunately I've got the same on the amazon.co.uk (UK). there doesn't appear to be anything popping up to say that anything is wrong either.
Hey, thanks for the heads up. It's likely because I was matching the host string with "amazon.com". I just pushed a change that should fix that, so you may see the modal as you should now. It's possible there are still errors since I'll need more time to figure out how to scrape other countries' Amazon pages.
If something goes wrong, we can continue this over email at swang93@mit.edu. Thanks!