How I send pay-wall articles from my Phone to Kindle in one click! — #ProductHack

2 min readJun 8, 2020

Ebook readers are not just for books, but massively improve the reading experience for articles too. One thing they do still suck at though is selecting content to read, where mobile phones excel.

I found myself frustrated by not being able to send articles from log-in websites from my mobile to my Kindle…

So I built a neat little solution so that I can turn these articles into Ebooks and send them to my Kindle in one-click!

Introduction: | Solution summary | Comparison with other options
Getting Setup: | Part 1: The beginning and the end| Part 2: The magic in the middle
More

Introduction

In this post, I share the motivation for my project and give an overview of the solution.

Solution Summary

I designed a Tasker script which conjoins an Ebook generating web-tool (dotepub), with Amazon’s send to Kindle email service to automatically send paywall articles, in Ebook format (because a PDF just doesn’t cut it) from my mobile browser to my Kindle at the click of a button.

Demo available at: 02:03

Comparison with other options

There are already plenty of apps that allow you to transfer content at the click of a button (the official Amazon Kindle app, Send To Kindle, Push to Kindle), and these work great with the open access websites like the BBC.

But why can’t I get it to work with articles from my local library, or my favourite paid for publications like The Economist, Time magazine, the Telegraph…?

The difference is that these articles are restricted or behind a paywall — you are required to log in to view the content. The apps mentioned all work by being passed the web address of the article and retrieving it itself. Because the app’s connection to the website doesn’t know to use your login details, the website treats the app like a non-paying customer and access to the article is DE-NIED.

Enter Dotepub and Tasker.