How to Get a Daily Newspaper on Your Kindle

Five ways to have the news waiting on your Kindle in the morning, what each one costs, and how much fiddling it takes.

A Kindle is a fine thing to read the news on: no notifications, no autoplay, and it doesn’t glow at you over breakfast. The hard part is getting the news onto it every day without doing it by hand. Here are the ways that work, starting with the one Amazon sells.

We make one of them, The Quiet Courier, so read the last section with that in mind. The other four are described as fairly as we can manage.

The short version

Method	Cost	Setup	Needs your computer on	What you get
A newspaper subscription from the Kindle Store	Set by each publisher	A few minutes	No	One newspaper, delivered overnight
Calibre's Fetch News	Free	An hour or so	Yes, it must be on	Any site Calibre has a recipe for
An RSS-to-Kindle service	Free to a few dollars a month	Choosing and pruning feeds	No	Whatever feeds you pick, as one daily file
Sending articles one at a time	Free	None	No, but it's by hand	Only what you send that day
The Quiet Courier	14 days free, then $4 a month	About five minutes	No	A finished paper at 5 a.m. with your weather

1. A newspaper subscription from the Kindle Store

Some newspapers and magazines sell a Kindle edition through Amazon. Find the paper in the Kindle Store, subscribe, and each new issue downloads to your Kindle overnight while it’s on Wi-Fi.

Good for: readers who already know the one paper they want. The catch: each subscription is one publication at its own price, the list of papers is limited and varies by country, and the layout is the publisher’s plain ebook text rather than a newspaper page.

2. Calibre’s Fetch News

Calibre, the free ebook manager for Windows, Mac and Linux, has a Fetch news button with built-in “recipes” for hundreds of news sites. It downloads the articles, turns them into an ebook, and can email the result to your Kindle’s Send to Kindle address on a schedule.

Good for: tinkerers who want a particular site and don’t mind some setup. The catch: the schedule only runs while your computer is on and Calibre is open, recipes break when a site redesigns, and paywalled sites need your login.

3. An RSS-to-Kindle service

Services and open-source projects such as KindleEar take the RSS feeds of sites you choose, bundle the new articles into one file, and email it to your Kindle each day. Some are hosted for you; KindleEar you run yourself.

Good for: people who already follow blogs or newsletters by RSS. The catch: you are the editor. Pick too many feeds and the file is enormous; too few and it’s thin. Many feeds carry only a summary, not the whole article.

4. Sending articles one at a time

Amazon’s Send to Kindle browser extension and app send any web page to your Kindle, and you can email documents to your Kindle’s address. It costs nothing and works with almost any site.

Good for: saving a few long reads for later. The catch: it’s by hand, every day, so it’s a reading list rather than a morning paper.

5. The Quiet Courier

This is ours. Every morning at 5 a.m. in your time zone, a finished newspaper arrives in your Kindle library: a lead story from The Conversation, the day’s events in brief, world reporting from Global Voices, science from NASA, the forecast for any city you choose, stories printed on this date in 1926, a chapter of a classic novel, a poem, and a sudoku, cryptogram and word search. It’s laid out in columns like an old broadsheet, sized to your Kindle’s screen, and takes about twenty minutes to read.

Good for: people who want a paper that ends, without running software or choosing feeds. The catch: you don’t pick the stories, and it costs $4 a month after 14 free days. Setup is approving one email address in your Amazon account, which our setup guide walks through with screenshots.

Whichever you choose: approve the sender

Every method except the Kindle Store emails files to your Kindle, and Amazon only accepts email from addresses you approve. Go to Amazon’s Manage Your Content and Devices page, open Preferences, then Personal Document Settings, and add the sending address under the approved email list. Your Kindle’s own Send to Kindle address is listed on the same page.