How is Readbetter different from Amazon's own Send to Kindle service?
Amazon's Send to Kindle and Readbetter both get content onto your Kindle, but they're designed for very different use cases.
Send to Kindle is Amazon's general-purpose document transfer tool. It's built for sending PDFs, Word documents, and other personal files to your Kindle. While it can technically handle web content through its browser extension, articles often lose their formatting—images disappear, layouts break, and the reading experience suffers. PDFs sent via Send to Kindle are rendered as static images, meaning you can't adjust font sizes or highlight text.
Readbetter is purpose-built for newsletters and web articles. It intelligently parses the HTML from newsletters and converts them into native Kindle e-books (EPUB format). This means your content looks clean and readable, images and charts are preserved, and you get full access to Kindle features like adjustable fonts, highlighting, and note-taking. Readbetter also strips out ads, navigation menus, and other clutter—leaving just the content you want to read.
The workflow is also very different. With Send to Kindle, you typically need to download content first, then use an app or extension to send it. With Readbetter, you simply forward an email to your personal inbox address and the article appears on your Kindle within seconds. No extra steps required.
Readbetter also offers features that Send to Kindle doesn't have:
- Rich media preservation – embedded tweets, charts, and images display properly
- Magazine feature – combine multiple articles into a single personalized e-book
- Works with 100+ newsletter formats – Substack, Beehiiv, ConvertKit, Medium, and more
- Native Kindle format – adjust fonts, highlight, and take notes (unlike PDFs)
The bottom line: Send to Kindle is a file transfer utility. Readbetter is a reading experience optimizer. If you want to read newsletters and web articles on your Kindle with a clean, distraction-free experience, Readbetter handles the conversion and delivery automatically.