I want to build a web service that sends articles to my Kindle

Where do I start?

Is there some sort of API - or something I can get access to that allows me to format articles and send them to my kindle?

I would like to do this in Rails.

Edit: For further clarity, I guess my real question is, how does instapaper.com get articles from the w开发者_如何学Pythoneb to my kindle? Can someone explain the technology behind that please and do they have access to the Kindle SDK?

Take a look at Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/), runs on Linux, Win and OS X. Python based, has a GUI and a command line, suitable for automation. You can do all kind of conversions to .mobi format as well as fetching news from website and packing it to .mobi, which can be then transferred via USB or sent to kindle email address. It's very simple to fetch & send articles automatically either on a server system with cron or leaving it running on desktop (with GUI) for non-technical users.

Calibre's command line tools are your best bet: http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual/cli/ebook-convert.html is the call you would most likely be interested in.

I believe all Instapaper does is convert to .mobi format, and then send mail (with the .mobi file attached) to your specified Kindle email address (eg. foo@kindle.com).

If you're more interested in specifics, Marco (Instapaper's author) tends to be very forthcoming when people ask him technical questions. His Twitter account is @marcoarment.

Check out this ruby gem, it seems to do what you want:

 https://github.com/29decibel/kindler