Add a “Subscribe on Kindle” button to your Bear blog

Long posts get read on Kindles more than you’d think, and most readers get them there the hard way: copy the link, open another tool, paste, send. You can do that step for them. A “Subscribe on Kindle” link under your posts sends the one they’re reading to their device in a couple of clicks, free, without an account, and lets them follow your blog there. You don’t need an account either: the code below is the same for every blog, and there is nothing to set up first.

For now this works on Bear blogs, on a bearblog.dev address or a custom domain. Other platforms are coming.

Step 1: Copy the link

As plain text, which picks up your site’s own link style:

<a href="https://www.rsstokindle.com/read?url={{ post_link }}" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Subscribe on Kindle</a>

Or as a badge:

<a href="https://www.rsstokindle.com/read?url={{ post_link }}" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img src="https://www.rsstokindle.com/badges/read-on-kindle.svg" alt="Subscribe on Kindle" height="28"></a>

And the same badge for a dark theme:

<a href="https://www.rsstokindle.com/read?url={{ post_link }}" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img src="https://www.rsstokindle.com/badges/read-on-kindle-dark.svg" alt="Subscribe on Kindle" height="28"></a>

The badge is a plain image, so it can’t follow your theme’s light and dark modes by itself; pick the one that suits your page.

Step 2: Paste it into your footer

In your Bear dashboard, open Settings and paste the code into the Footer directive. It goes under every post, old ones included, and needs no JavaScript, so it works on the free plan. {{ post_link }} is Bear’s own placeholder for the address of the post being read; Bear fills it in, and that is how we know which article your reader wants. Leave it exactly as it is.

There is no script to load and nothing of ours runs on your page. If you’d rather not have it on every page, the same line works pasted into a single post.

What happens on a click

We work out which blog the post belongs to from its address. If we already follow your blog, your reader lands on its page straight away. If we’ve never seen it, the first click reads your post’s page once to find your feed, and your blog’s page is created on the spot; it fills in over the next few seconds.

1. They click Subscribe on Kindle. Your blog’s page on RSS to Kindle opens in a new tab, with your post still open behind it.
2. The post they came from is at the top, marked “The article you came from”.
3. They click Send to Kindle. The first time, they enter their Kindle’s email address and approve our sender in their Amazon settings (the two-minute setup). After that it’s one click, on your blog or any other with the button.
4. The post arrives as a properly formatted ebook, usually within a couple of minutes.

Nothing is sent until they click, and they never need an account. If they like it, they can subscribe and get your new posts on their Kindle automatically.

Things worth knowing

• Brand-new posts work. A click from a post we haven’t seen yet makes us re-read your feed there and then, and the post appears on the page a few seconds later.
• Older posts work too, as long as they were in your feed at some point since we first read it.
• What we record: which blog a click came from, and whether we had the article. Not who your reader is, and not what else they do on your site.
• The link is permanent. It lives in your footer, so we treat its address, and the badge’s, as something we can’t change.
• Have a book as well as a blog? If you publish long work as an EPUB file, readers can put it on their Kindle with our free EPUB tool.
• Try it on one post first. Click your own button and check your post appears on top.