How to Do (Almost) Everything With a Kindle

The Kindle suffers from two things: 1) it’s never going to do everything that a full-fledged computer or even a color touchscreen tablet can do; and 2) the Kindle 3 has improved on a whole slew of features that were either poorly implemented in or entirely absent from earlier iterations of the Kindle.

 1. Reading PDF
You don’t need to email yourself copies; you can hook up your Kindle to your computer through a USB cable, mount the Kindle’s drive, and drag-and-drop.
One big suggestion. Just because of its screen size, viewing PDFs on the Kindle is much better if they’re oriented in portrait rather than landscape, and if they’re single-page documents rather than spreads (i.e., where a book is scanned/photocopied two pages at a time). Printed office documents, downloaded journal articles, maps, etc., all look great. They’re monochrome, obviously, but they read as well as an e-book. You can even highlight and annotate them just like you can Kindle books — that is, assuming they’re real text PDFs, not just bundled images.

2. Free/public-domain books on the Kindle
Amazon “sells” a number of public-domain books for $0 through the Kindle store. You can also download public-domain books from Project Gutenberg and Google Books.
Project Gutenberg actually has a mobile version of its website where you can download Kindle-compatible e-books directly. Just fire up your Kindle’s web browser and go to m.gutenberg.org. 

Select a book, scroll downwards (using the “next page” button allows you to scroll quickly), and select the “Kindle” version. (There are also HTML, EPUB, and TXT available, usually.) Your Kindle will show you a scary message, saying “Do you really want to download pg###.mobi? It will be available on your Home screen.” Don’t worry. “pg###” is just the Project Gutenberg internal title of the book. It will still show up on your Kindle by its proper book title. And it’s GOOD that the book will be available on your home screen; that’s where all of your other books are kept.

Read EPUB files on the Kindle
Google Books allows you to download public-domain books not in Kindle’s AZW or MOBI formats, but in the competing EPUB standard. But there are a couple of good ways to convert EPUB files without DRM (like those you download from Google Books) into Kindle-compatible formats.
If you are For Real about digging into e-books, I advise you to download the multi-platform e-book management app Calibre immediately. Among its other virtues (e-reader client, e-library manager) Calibre is an e-book-converting monster:

Input Formats: CBZ, CBR, CBC, CHM, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC**, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, TCR, TXT
Output Formats: EPUB, FB2, OEB, LIT, LRF, MOBI, PDB, PML, RB, PDF, TCR, TXT

 What’s more, Calibre will sync these files to your Kindle, either through USB or by setting itself up as a server. Mounting the Kindle and dragging and dropping files to it is pretty easy already, but since your library of converted/downloaded books is already in Calibre, this can make it even easier.

Send books to Kindle wirelessly.
You do have to pay Amazon to have non-Amazon docs converted and sent to your device IF they’re sent over 3G. The key thing to avoid charges is to always sign up for services using your username@free.kindle.com email address. If you do this, then your device will only add documents when it’s using Wi-Fi — and that’s free.
Who use the kindle email service, should try out this free program. Kindle Sender – https://sourceforge.net/projects/kindlesender/files/ . It removes all the hassle of logging onto your email account and adding it as an attachment. You simply drag and drop your document onto the program and it sends it for you

Reading blogs and websites on my Kindle
The web browser — based on WebKit, the same rendering engine as Safari and mobile Safari — is so much better than previous instances that usually you can use this to read blogs without any special conversion.
For some reason the web browser is still listed under the “Experimental” menu, but this thing is ready to go. Among friends, we suspect that Amazon doesn’t actually want to advertise how good the web experience is, because it’s on the hook for all the 3G data its users consume.
Again, I prefer the mobile versions of most websites to the standard ones; you don’t have to pan/zoom, but it’s not hard to bookmark your favorites. (Liberal use of bookmarks also saves you from repeat typing, which is improved but still not fantastic.) Mobile versions of text-heavy websites (like mobile Twitter, Instapaper, Google Reader, etc.) look and function the very best.
The other amazing improvement in the new Kindle browser is something called “Article Mode.” This is identical to the new “Reader” button in Safari, or the Readability bookmarklet. Basically, if you go to an ordinary web page, and it’s cluttered with images, ads, or laid out in a way that’s hard to read on your Kindle, click the “Menu” button and then “Article Mode.” Instantly the web page will be laid out in an easy-to-read text column, just like if you’d sent it to Instapaper.

Sync large libraries
Readers trying to synchronize large libraries of PC folder content into Kindle collections should look at Kranf Kindle Collection Manager. http://www.applied-mathematics.net/tools/kindleCollectionManager.html.

eBook Conversion
Savory is a native ebook conversion package for the Kindle 2. It lets you download and read PDFs and ePubs on the Kindle without a manual conversion step. It runs natively on the Kindle. While it doesn’t add anything that you couldn’t do from a desktop, it streamlines the process, allowing you copy epubs and PDFs to your Kindle over USB or download them from the web, and immediately read them offline.

Send web articles I save in Instapaper to Kindle
Can navigate through the web interface, which is pretty good. Or, you can have Instapaper send articles to your Kindle device. Now, instead of being in your browser, your Instapaper articles will be grouped with and formatted like Newspapers and Magazines. Instapaper’s Marco Arment has said that using the Kindle is his “favorite way to read content from Instapaper.” And that was on the janky old Kindle 2.
 
http://www.wordcycler.com  It is a two-way Instapaper sync for Windows and your e-book reader.

Sort my books, articles, PDFs, or whatever into folders?
A. Yes. They’re called “Collections.” From your “Home” screen, click the “Menu” button — there are a lot of keys on the keyboard, but “Menu,” “Home,” the directional keys, Return, Select, and the page turn buttons are your friends — and choose “Create New Collection.” Once you’ve created it, you can add/remove items, change how you sort through them — the works. Great way to group by kind, genre, category, or even levels of attention.

Read Manga On Your Kindle With Mangle
Mangle (Manga + Kindle = Mangle, get it?) was designed by FooSoft’s Alex Yatsov for the bad old days, before the Kindle had decent orientation tools. But it’s still really useful for getting your comic images in the right alignment and order. Plus, it’s compiled for Mac and Windows, or you can run it right in Python.
To make it even easier, the iReader Review blog included step-by-step directions and blogged the process. They hit a few snags, but the final product looks very nice indeed.


RSS on Kindle
Kindlefeeder is a service for Amazon Kindle owners that lets you aggregate your favorite feeds and have them delivered to your Kindle in a convenient, easy-to-navigate eBook.

SENDtoREADER is a simple web application that allows you to send any webpage to your Amazon Kindle Reader instantly.
This gives your Kindle the flexibility to be your work or leisure time companion with a simple click of the mouse.

http://www.kindlesend.com it lets you send rss, email, and fanfiction to your kindle.

 

eBook Reading Tools:
1. Kindle Cloud Reader: read eBooks from anywhere
2. Kindle Reader for PC and Mac: read eBooks on your computer
3. Kindle Previewer: see how converted eBooks will look on your Kindle
General EBook Conversion:
4. Amazon Kindle email conversion service: free online eBook conversion service
5. Calibre: eBook conversion and management software
6. Hamster Free eBook Converter: casual, powerful eBook converter
7. Auto Kindle eBook Converter: converts PDF, Lit, and HTML files to Kindle-friendly .MOBI format
PDF to Kindle conversion:
8. Briss: visual PDF cropping tool
9. K2PDFopt: converts complex PDF’s into Kindle friendly ones
- Also see my two related how-to articles on optimizing PDFs for reading on the Kindle (here and here).
Organizing files on your Kindle:
10. Koll3ction: use folder structures to organize your Kindle documents into collections
Sending Web Content to your Kindle:
11. SENDtoREADER: bookmarklet to send any web pages, Google Reader entries to your Kindle
12. Kindle It: browser extension that will send any web page to the Kindle
13. KindleFeeder: deliver up to 12 RSS feeds to your Kindle via whispernet
14. Greader2Kindle: read your Google Reader feeds on your Kindle
15. Instapaper: automatically delivers unread Instapaper articles to your Kindle
16. ReadItLater: deliver unread ReadItLater articles to your Kindle
17. Readability: receive your Readability reading list automatically on your Kindle