Thanks to social networks, reading books also became a social activity, just like many of our activities. I personally used to share quotes and highlights of the book which I read in my social accounts, especially on twitter, for a couple of reasons:
- Helps me to remember those best parts of the books.
- It motivates me when people react to my posts on social media to keep up with my reading habit.
- It may encourage my friends to read books, or at least find the books they may be interested in.
Before borrowing my wife’s Kindle, I used to type those highlights/quotes to share them on my social accounts, but having the piece of technology, Amazon Kindle, in my hand made me expect a more convenient way to share those highlights; directly share from Amazon Kindle to my social timelines.
If you are a Kindle user, you probably know that Amazon is no longer supporting social sharing in the Kindle operating system. (seriously why?!)
But I’m not that kind of guy who gives up with this kind of answer. So I found a way to share the highlights directly from Kindle to my Twitter, and I’m showing you the trick here. This method should also work for different social networks (Facebook for example).
For implementing this method, you need:
- A non-Gmail email account (Gmail doesn’t support transferring content to twitter too — what’s wrong with you tech giants?!)
- An Integromat account (or an account in any other automation platforms like IFTTT, Zapier, or …)
- Obviously, a social media account.
An Overview
When you highlight a part of the text in your Kindle and then tap on the Share, you will see only 2 options: Email and Goodreads. In this tutorial, I’m using the Email option to achieve my goal (share the highlight on my twitter account).
The whole process would be something like this:
- I will share the highlight/quote with my own email which I made recently for this specific purpose.
- I will set a middleware to read my email and tweet the email content on behalf of me.
Step 1: Grant access to your mailbox
Make a scenario (AKA integration) on your Integromat account and connect it to your email. I strongly recommend making an exclusive email address for this purpose to avoid tweeting your personal information or spamming your friends by tweeting your marketing emails. I made an email under my own domain (tweet@sanisel.com). You may create a new account for yourself on Yahoo (mytweets@msn.com for example).
You need to input some data like your email address and password (or more settings if you’re using your domain-hosted email address) in order to connect Integromat to your email and authorize it to access your emails.
You don’t need any additional settings after connecting your email to your Integromat account.
Here is a not-so-well-detailed article on how to connect your Integromat account to your newly-made mailbox.
Step 2: Make everything tidy and clean
I wanted my tweets to be tidy and clean, including the highlight/quote, a #goodread hashtag, and also a link to the book on the Amazon website. In order to have this all next to each other in one tweet, we need a middleware in Integromat which can be handled by adding a “Text Parser”:
In this step, I’m trying to look into the sent email for the link of the book, so I have to use a RegularExpression (AKA RegEx — A technical thing, don’t bother) to math with the pattern of a URL. Here is the RegEx I’ve used, you may also use the same RegEx:
((\w+:\/\/)[-a-zA-Z0–9:@;?&=\/%\+\.\*!’\(\),\$_\{\}\^~\[\]`#|]+)
don’t forget to select the “Text Content” for the “Text” field at the bottom of the modal. (This way, you’re telling Integromat to search for URL inside the content of the emails and extract that)
Step 3: Tweet
Now, you have everything you need to post the tweet. Add a Twitter integration into your scenario. It’s an easy step, but if you’re experiencing difficulty, this link may help.
Fill the status part like above; however, you may customize the structure of the tweet as you want. But there are few points to should not forget:
- Twitter has a 280 character limit for each tweet. Since I wanted a #GoodRead hashtag (9 characters) in the beginning and the link to the book (23 characters) + three dots (…) after the highlight, I used the Substring function to find the first 240~250 characters of the highlight/quote. (approximately 180 characters in total). If your tweet becomes more than 280 characters, it will not be posted.
- It’s better to use a Trim function to remove unwanted spaces after and before the highlight.
The orange “12. $1” part is where the link will show up in the tweet, yours could be different based on your settings.
Step4: Save, test, schedule
Okay, you’re almost done! Just click on the “Run Once” to see if everything is working fine (you have to share something from your Kindle to your newly-made email address before being able to test). Check your twitter account and see if your tweet is posted.
If everything is working, click on the small clock icon on the left bottom corner of your Integromat page to schedule the scenario, and set intervals between checking or email address and posting tweets (minimum is 15 minutes for free subscription).
Save it and enjoy reading, socializing :)
P.S. I wrote this post very fast. I know it could be more detailed and more clear, If this post reaches 1000 claps, I will understand that it has been useful, so I will update it with more details.
