Amazon Kindle update: What does it mean for SendToReader and DroidToReader?

I received an email from Amazon yesterday evening informing me of some updates to the Kindle Personal Documents service. The updates are as follows:

• Documents are now archived in your Kindle library.
• Archived documents can be re-downloaded to the new Kindle and Kindle Touch devices as well as the older Kindle Keyboard – the latter requiring the new 3.3 update.
• Whispersync now syncs the last page read, bookmarks and annotations (except for PDFs).
• These features will probably be extended to the Kindle Fire and the platform-specific Kindle apps.

It looks as though these new settings aren’t being applied retroactively, so you’ll only be able to re-download newly sent documents (as in, documents sent after the update) from the Kindle device itself. You can, however, log in to your Amazon account via a browser and send previously sent items to your Kindle.

This makes the SendToReader (for which I wrote an Android app called DroidToReader) service even better, because it means that you can read your articles, delete them, and re-download them from your Kindle archive instead of having to go find the article again and sending it to your Kindle again.

What’s more, it looks like Amazon wants to enhance their platform-specific apps to include this feature as well. With SendToReader/DroidToReader, this effectively means that you can send articles from your PC/Android device to any (and every) device with the Kindle app. Amazon then syncs your position, bookmarks and notes with that item.

I’m excited about this – it means that my reading can become even more synchronised and I have to be less reliant on a single device. I’ve long wondered why it’s not possible to send things to my tablet or phone Kindle apps for offline reading, and it looks like Amazon is asking the same question (and coming up with an answer!).

Here’s hoping the update for the Android app comes soon!

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