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NetGalley Has stopped support the Kindle (at the moment)

The manuscript review site NetGalley have just announced that they’ll no longer be temporarily stop sending ebooks to your Kindle.

You may notice a slight change in NetGalley when you next log in: where’s my Kindle button? Due to changes in the way Amazon’s personal document delivery service works, we’ve had to temporarily disable the Kindle button. All of our other reading options will still be available, in accordance with what the publisher enables for each particular title. (This includes our Quick Browse web-based reader, and support for the Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo Reader, Sony Reader, your computer, and the iPad and iPhone!) Stay tuned; we’ll be working on a way to reintroduce this reading option just as soon as we can!

I don’t understand why they stopped. So far as I know there’s no charge for them to send the content; the recipient pays for it. Maybe whatever they do to automate the process doesn’t work at the moment. But I don’t see how; it’s just an email with an attachment.

Update: One commenter remarked that Amazon have started checking the validity of the from email addresses for emails sent to Kindles. The trick of faking a valid from address no longer works.

On the other hand, maybe they’re going to start using the Kindle’s new lending system. That could be interesting. I don’t see how it would work, but that could be interesting.

I’ll see what I can dig up. Someone remind me about this next week.

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Comments


Fran Toolan January 12, 2011 um 7:44 pm

It is incorrect to say that NetGalley no longer supports the Kindle option.

What the email said was that we temporarily turned it off.

There is a problem on the NetGalley end, not on the Amazon end.

We are working to solve it as quickly as possible.

Fran Toolan
President, NetGalley


Michael January 12, 2011 um 7:59 pm

I’m not a Netgalley user, but speculating based on my own recent experience, I’d say it’s probably because of a change in the way Amazon handles e-mails received at one’s Kindle address.

In the past, I automatically e-mailed various server stats files to my Kindle periodically without problem, simply setting my From: address to match the e-mail address I’m registered under on Amazon. Then a little while ago, these e-mails started being rejected. Amazon started doing SPF validation to see if the host sending the e-mail matched the host of record. In my case it didn’t.

The easy solution of course was to start sending the e-mails from a different address that could be validated, and adding the address as an approved sender in the Kindle management area of Amazon’s site.

I’m guessing Netgalley was doing the same sort of thing in the past, simply asking people their @kindle address and what e-mail addy they have registered with Amazon, and sending the file with the From: address set to the one supplied by the user. Now I suspect they’ll have to both ask for an @kindle address, and ask people to add an @netgalley.com address as an approved sender. A little more work for the user, but certainly nothing difficult.


Michael January 12, 2011 um 8:30 pm

Fran, sorry for adding my speculation after you had already replied. I must’ve started my reply before your comment appeared.

I hope you’re able to resolve whatever issue you ran into without much difficulty.


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