Why I Stopped Reading Web Articles on My Phone (and How I Send Them to Kindle & Kobo in One Tap)
Let me tell you a story. Anyone who follows my blog knows that I didn't always have a great relationship with traditional paper books. Years ago, frustrated by the fact that I wasn't reading enough, I bought my first Kindle—and unexpectedly, my main use for it wasn't novels. It was reading long web articles about programming, science, and technology.
The midnight smartphone trap
We all do it: during the day you find an awesome 15-minute long-read or technical deep-dive on Safari or Chrome. You don't have time while working, so you keep the tab open for later. Then at 11:30 PM, in bed, you try to read it on your phone.
Between the blinding OLED backlight, cookie consent walls, sticky video ads that jump around, and WhatsApp notifications popping up at the top, you end up closing the page halfway through with tired eyes. Reading on digital ink—whether it's a Kindle Paperwhite, a Kobo Clara/Libra, or an Onyx Boox—is a completely different world. The screen reflects light like real paper, and your brain actually slows down and focuses.
From Send to Kindle to a cross-platform reader ecosystem
Back in 2020, when the old Android app a colleague and I used to beam articles to our Kindles vanished from the Play Store, he told me: "Why don't you build one yourself?" That's how my first app, Send to Kindle, was born and grew past 70,000+ downloads.
Over the years, though, the e-reader world evolved. Many readers switched to Kobo, PocketBook, or Onyx Boox, or got tired of fighting with Amazon's approved email lists. And honestly, sometimes I wanted to preview the cleaned-up article before sending it—or even read it offline on the subway. That's why I built Send to Reader.
Mini-Guide: How to send any web article to your e-reader in 30 seconds
You don't need browser extensions on a computer, USB cables, or email server configurations. Everything happens directly from the smartphone already in your pocket:
Open the article in Safari, Chrome, or your news app
Find any blog post, tutorial, essay, or news article you want to save for later. It works from any browser or app on iPhone, iPad, and Android.
Tap the system "Share" button and pick Send to Reader
Open the native share menu (the square with an upward arrow on iOS, or the three dots → Share on Android) and tap Send to Reader. Tip: pin it to your Favorites so it's always the first icon!
Let the parser strip away the junk (and check the preview)
Behind the scenes, the app extracts only the real article text, headings, and useful images—throwing away ads, newsletter popups, and sidebars. It even generates a clean typographical book cover so your e-reader library stays tidy.
Download in one tap on Kindle, Kobo, or Boox
Tap Send. When you pick up your e-reader on the couch, open its built-in web browser to sr.luciosoft.it (you only pair it once with a 6-digit code) and tap to download your article formatted like a real book chapter.
One feature I built primarily for myself is the In-App Offline Reader. Every article you share can also be read right inside Send to Reader with Sepia, Dark, or Light themes, custom font sizes, and a 1-tap button to hide distracting images.
Why this beats traditional read-it-later tools on E-Ink
While Kobo has had Pocket integration (which has been facing major changes lately) and Kindle has its own email system, neither gives you a unified reading queue that works across all brands at once while letting you customize the book title, author, and cover before sending. If you own both a Kindle and a Kobo—or if you switch devices in the future—your workflow never changes.