Ways to Convert a Web Page into Kindle 3 Format

When it comes to converting a web page for reading on Kindle 3, PDF is not always desirable. Though in general web content is reflowable and resizable, images and tables are not the case. For example, a typical Wikipedia page containing mathematical formulas and tables would get trimmed if the output page size is set for Kindle 3. That's why it's wise to choose MOBI instead of PDF as the output format since the images and tables could retain their size while their detail could be viewed by zooming out locally.

There are several ways for conversion from a web page into Kindle 3 format. However, none of them are perfect so far.

1. Instapaper is capable of converting all the articles for you to read later into a single Kindle 3 periodical. It's useful for reading casual passages but not desirable for referring to and organizing specific articles on the Kindle 3 since every periodical has the same title so that you need to open it to find where the article is.
   UPDATE: Calibre has a built-in recipe to fetch the unread list in text view with images retained. which seems like the most favorable solution so far for converting general web pages.
2. Calibre does this job almost perfectly in terms of image quality and table structures compared to Kindlepedia and Instapaper even if some scientific notations like nested superscripts and subscripts are not well-converted. It's better to save the printable version of the web page for import.
   UPDATE1: nested superscripts conversion has been fixed in the latest release.
   UPDATE2: saving web pages with built-in web2disk can convert html anchors to relative links.
3. dotEPUB is easy to use as a browser extension, plugin or bookmark. They would preprocess the web page into a readable form using Readablility and then transform the intermediate into an epub file for downloading. Unfortunately, the readable form may unexpectedly eliminate the desirable images and tables. Besides, you had better download kindlegen by Amazon to convert the epub into mobi for Kindle to avoid the limitations of Calibre above.
4. The perfect way is to copy the web page into a word processor like Google docs which is able to send the manually edited and formatted content as an RTF attachment to your Kindle email account for conversion while the scientific notations are retained but extra effort is required.

Overall, there seems no perfect and efficient method for converting web pages so far. The key is whether it could make the content readable without losing necessary information while getting the conversion done accurately. Maybe a future color Kindle with a full-featured browser and modern note-taking extensions could simply blow away the obstacles.