Amazon rolls out ‘Send to Kindle’ button for news sites & WordPress blogs

In what’s surely a win for lovers of long-form journalism (or needlessly long, rant-filled blog posts), Amazon has just rolled out a new “Send to Kindle” button for online publications to embed into their websites.

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Previously, to gain this kind of functionality you needed to install a browser plug-in to send articles or links to your Kindle device, which was a bit clunky at times but got the job done. Now all you need to do is click the “send to” button on the website to transfer over those articles — both to your Kindle devices or any of the Kindle Apps. Clicking the “Kindle” button on a website will prompt you to sign in to your Amazon account and then ask you to determine which devices you want to read the article on. (As shown in the screenshot, I can choose between sending it to my iPad or Nexus 7.  Kindle Fires and Kindle Readers should also pop up in the list of options for those that own them.)

The button itself was built specifically for websites and WordPress blogs, and a handful of sites are already using it, including The Washington Post, BoingBoing, and Time. Amazon is allowing  publishers some degree of customization over how the button looks, probably so that it fits with the overall design.

While this move is wonderful for readers, I have to wonder what the long-term implications will be for allowing people to strip out all the advertising from the website in order to rip the content onto the device of their choice. Of course, there are already a ton of other “reader” features that are automatically built into browsers, devices, and applications, so this may be a moot point. (There’s also something good to be said for publications that make it easier for their audience to interact with products/content.)

Do you plan on using the “Send to Kindle” button more often? Let us know in the comment section below.