Reading Your Own Documents with the Amazon Kindle
The Amazon Kindle is the best seller book reader from Amazon. By now, everyone must have heard about the Kindle, since it was featured in Oprah and almost all other media outlets. The Kindle is a huge success, but many people still don't know exactly what it does, and if it is really a good gadget to buy.
I already talked about several other features of the Kindle, but this time I would like to show the capacity of this device in displaying my own documents.
As you probably know, the Kindle can be use to browse and read anyone of the millions of books in the Amazon bookstore. Most of the Kindle books are sold at a big discount compared to normal books. This is a great feature, and if this was all it provided it would be already worth the price.
However, the Kindle still support an additional feature that gives you even more power: you can convert any document to be read in the Kindle, as if it came from the Amazon Store itself.
How can you do this? It is really simple. Amazon provides, free of charge, a service that converts documents in your computer to the Kindle format. You can do this in two ways:
- Send the document through email, and ask Amazon to send it wirelessly to your Kindle. Amazon gives you a specific email address for that (you can check it on the Kindle help pages). In this option, however, Amazon charges a few cents for each document that is sent by wireless.
- The second option also involves an initial conversion through email. This time, however, Amazon sends you a link to the converted document and you can save it to the Kindle using an USB device. The disadvantage is that you need to connect the Kindle to the computer. But it is totally free, you don't need to pay a cent for this service.
Using one of these two ways, you can convert any document you wrote or received from someone else into a Kindle document. You can now read the document as you would any book.
Here are some uses for this feature:
- reading work reports: I can just go through any reports from my work using the Kindle. No need to carry paper around.
- Reading web pages: If I find a web page that I would like to read, I just convert it using the services described above. This way, I don't need to spend my time on the computer. I can also read the page only when I have free time.
- Reading free e-books: It is possible to find lots of e-books for free on the web. If you get one of these e-books, you can also convert them to a free Kindle document and read it when you want.
The conversion process provided by Amazon is really fast and accurate. It works on most document types, such as word doc, PDF, html, and other formats. Check the Kindle documentation page on Amazon and you will find the details.
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