I’ve had November’s US Wired for almost a week now. Here it is. I haven’t been able to find time to unwrap it.

However, I have been reading a lot on my Kindle. Obviously, it’s not about finding time more than finding convenience.

So maybe moving Wired into the Kindle would help? Strangely, Wired is not in the Kindle Store yet, so let’s take a look at their feed.

As expected, the magazine only provides excerpts in the feed. You’ll have to go to the site to see the full text. And the ads that pay for it.

But wait. I pay, too. There must be some way of getting the full articles into the feed, and then read that on the Kindle?

Yes. This is what the Pipe looks like.

Or, in short,

1. Take the feed

2. Change all links to point to the full article (instead of the paged ones)

3. Scrape the article

4. Add the full article to a new node in the feed

Voila:

With a feed holding all full articles, the only thing left is finding a convenient way to read it on the Kindle. I quickly hacked together a PHP script that parses the JSON from Pipes.

Not bad. But as with any digital body of text, I find myself thinking: “What am I looking at here? Two minutes? Twenty?”

This is where the magazine wins (again). By glancing, I get an impression of how long this article is. I can tell this one is long if they spend a full page on a portrait.

What would a size indicator look like on the Kindle?

The bar just below the headline gives a glance-friendly impression of how long this article is. The book overview on the Kindle’s home screen has something similar to this.

• Yahoo Pipes
• Wired Magazine, US
• Amazon Kindle, international edition (contains affiliate ID, so please buy!)

This entry was posted on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 2:29 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.