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Turn your RSS feeds into a PDF magazine: genius or useless?

Written on 3rd December 2008 22 COMMENTS
Paul Vereijken, Next Web Journalism & Media editor

Of course you’re using a RSS reader to check your feeds. But don’t you just love the feeling of reading a newspaper or magazine? Well, take a look at Hewlett-Packards Tabbloid. This free service converts the latest posts of your favorite blogs into a printable PDF.

Tabbloid is very easy to use. Surf to their website, enter your favorite feeds, your e-mail address and decide when you want to recieve your magazine. Tabbloid compiles the feeds and mails a printable PDF to you.

Personally I love the idea. Reading from paper is much more relaxed than reading from a screen. But I have to admit I wouldn’t use it. Why not? Well, links, embedded video and other dynamic stuff don’t work on print. And that’s to much too give up for me.

[Via Springwise]

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22 Comments »

About the author: Paul Vereijken is a Dutch freelance journalist with loads of enthusiasm and creativity, who focuses on how the next web is changing his profession.

22 comments/trackbacks to “Turn your RSS feeds into a PDF magazine: genius or useless?”

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By André Luís on Dec 3, 2008

I don’t own a printer. End of story.

;)

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By Bjorn on Dec 3, 2008

This is great for long stories I don’t want to read rightaway. So I’d like to hook up my gReaders starred items.

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By Luca F. on Dec 3, 2008

I think it’s an extremely good idea…

the world is not just made of geeks who read everything on their PC. Many people love to print stuff…

the other weekend I was on a train to Paris and my neighbor was going through endless pages printed off the internet…

that person is certainly be a good typical user of the service…

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By Paul Vereijken on December 3rd, 2008:
I totally agree with you Luca. But still, it only works if the feeds publishes the full post and if it doesn’t bother the reader he can’t watch video or click links and stuff.

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By Luca F. on December 3rd, 2008:
I think HP just showed Google what functionality they should implement in their Google Reader :-)

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By Paul Vereijken on December 3rd, 2008:
That is so true!

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By Ben G on Dec 3, 2008

I love it. However..

– i don’t want to double-configure my list of feeds.

– i don’t want to wait for whenever for it to send me a pdf – i’d prefer a link i can get an up-to-the-minute pdf to print out. (and some mechanism for deciding what’s new to print of course.)

so i’d probably not try it out in this form. but i love the idea.

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By Paul Vereijken on December 3rd, 2008:
So if you could add Tabbloid to your RSS reader like an add-on and you would be able to download the PDF on demand you would try it out?

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By Ben G on December 3rd, 2008:
Certainly! That would be perfect.

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By Paul Vereijken on December 3rd, 2008:
Maybe Bjorns tip helps you out: http://thenextweb.com/2008/12/.....ment-13871

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By Bjorn on Dec 3, 2008

Tonight I set it up as follows: I added the tag “tabloid”. I hooked up the feed of “tabloid” to the service. Every morning I get a daily e-mail with a pdf with all articles tagged with “tabloid”. I’ll check it out for a couple of days.

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By Paul Vereijken on December 3rd, 2008:
Thanks for the great tip!

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By Ben G on December 4th, 2008:
In which reader?

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By Bjorn on December 4th, 2008:
Google Reader

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By Jamie Riddell on Dec 4, 2008

I think it is a great idea for storing up RSS feeds to read whilst travelling. I would like to see the ability to pipe my own RSS feeds into the PDF and send to people who still like ‘newsletters’ – that would be a huge benefit.

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By Sofia on Dec 4, 2008

I can see myself using it to keep up to date people I work with who are not at home with RSS (Yes, they do exist). Sort of like an ‘update sheet’ from time to time. Not a bad idea at all.

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By Cory O'Brien on Dec 6, 2008

I think this was a smart move by HP to integrate into your daily tech routine without over-branding and over-selling their own products. They provide an app that has a lot of value to many users (the RSS to print space has only a few competitors, and Tabbloid is probably the best) and they show that they care about the needs of their customers by providing the app for free, so it’s a win all around.

http://thefutureofads.com/2008.....-sell-ink/

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