I love my Nook Simple Touch. It is light weight, easy to use and has a microSD slot allowing a huge digital library on the go. So, I’ve kept an eye out for a way to toss some of the articles I run across into ebook format for later reading. Calibre has the capability to capture URLs and convert them to all of the ebook formats the program handles. The biggest problem I’ve had with Calibre is it only converts one address at a time and captures everything on the page including all of the ads and assorted links and minutia which clutter up the formatting on the Nook.

Readlists.com is a web-based solution offered up by the folks at Readability. From the homepage, you see the day’s featured Readlists. Scroll down to the bottom of the homepage and you will find an easy to miss “Recent Readlists” button which will let you scroll through other Readlister’s gleanings. You can view any of these Readlists online or download as you see fit.

Click on the big “Make a Readlists” button at the top of the homepage and you are ready to start cutting and pasting the URLs of the article or post that you want converted to ebook. Readlists lets you take a variety of links, drop them in line by line and then create an easy on the eyes ebook. You can then download your ebook, email it, or send it to your Kindle or iDevice.

So far, all of the URLs I have tried with Readlists have resulted in an ebook that formats well on my Nook very similar to the format I see when reading the site on Readablity.

While you can create anonymous Readlists you can also login via your Readability account. The advantage of logging in is you are able to manage your Readlists via your userid. However, this logging in via Readability is the biggest problem I have with Readlists: you cannot easily log out. Also, the only indication you have that you have successfully logged in is when you try to create a Readlist: your Readability userid will appear in the “Created by” statement under the Readlists title strip. Your userid is found at the top of the bar along the left hand side of the page once you hit “Make a Readlist”.

The only way I found to break the linkage between any future Readlist I created from my Readability userid was to force a logout in Readlists by using my browser’s (in this case, Firefox) security features to clear my cookies. I also cleared cache, active logins and site preferences at the same time — which might or might not have been overkill. Once I cleared these settings, my Readlists went back to anonymous.

If I am missing something here, like an obvious “logout” option on Readlists that I’m simply not seeing, please let me know in the Comments.