Thursday, July 10, 2008

Feedbooks News

Have you heard of the Feedbooks News service? If you own a Kindle you need to try it out ASAP. This extremely cool service shoots RSS feeds directly to your Kindle, completely free of charge. Over lunch today I grabbed several feeds including slashdot, the NY Times homepage and Wired's Top Stories. And hey, if you're looking for either of my blogs on the go, grab the feed for Publishing 2020 here and Kindleville here.

Once you have the initial Feedbooks files on your Kindle you'll find that you need to go to the cover of each one and select "Update this feed" to get the latest and greatest content. I didn't see a way to automate this step but I'm hoping Feedbooks adds that option soon; I'd hate to think I forgot to press "Update this feed" for all my subscriptions before I jump on a plane! I sent a message to Feedbooks asking if an auto-update feature is on the drawing board for service enhancements...I'll let you know what I hear. In the mean time, give Feedbooks News a shot. You won't regret it.

UPDATE: I spoke with Hadrien Gardeur of Feedbooks and he told me that "only Amazon can provide auto-updates on the Kindle. But as long as you're within EVDO range you can easily update (1 click)." I'm in my second day of using this service and although I wish it offered auto-updates like I described I find it quite usable as is.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just use Google Reader on your Kindle. It updates automatically.

Joe Wikert said...

My experience has been that no RSS reader pulls down the full content of every post automatically, just the headlines. Have I simply not configured it right? I'm not looking for something that just shows headlines and requires a live connection to get the rest of the post. I need something that allows me to read full articles on a plane, far away from an Internet connection.