There are three ways to place your personal documents on the Kindle: 1) sideload them with a USB cable; 2) send them to your kindle email address; 3) use one of the new(ish) PC or Mac applications to send to Kindle from your file system.  In this post I am going to review all three techniques and deal with questions readers might have about formats and fees. File Types Before we begin the discussion, here is a list of the file formats supported natively by the Kindle, taken from the Amazon web site: Microsoft Word (.DOC, .DOCX) HTML (.HTML, .HTM) RTF (.RTF) JPEG (.JPEG, .JPG) Kindle Format (.MOBI,...

Last week Amazon updated the software for the Kindle Touch that now makes the Touch the most advanced Kindle of all.  While the Kindle family continues to diverge, it is easy to see that Amazon is betting the future on the Touch and touch enabled devices.   The new versions is number 5.1.0.  To see whether you have it, go to the Home screen, then tap menu > settings, and on the settings screen, tap menu again, and then Device Info.   If the version number does not read 5.1.0, you can download the new software from Amazon and follow their simple directions for installing it. After update...

In preparation for my workshop on eReaders next week I did a blog post describing the Kindle Family.  I was pretty dissatisfied with it because it took a lot of words to describe the many Kindle options currently available.  To clarify things, I decided to make a graphic.  In the graphic I try to hit the historical highlights of Kindle development in addition to clarifying the Kindle models, with options—especially pricing—but don’t depend on the scale of the graphic for complete historical accuracy.  I leaned heavily on the Wikipedia article on the Kindle for dates, but wasn’t able to...

In answer to the question, ‘What page was that on?’  The answer is: ‘it depends.’  It depends if you are reading the book on a Kindle, that is.  The problem of pagination with electronic texts is shared by all eReaders, of course, but since Kindles are the most popular I will concentrate on them in this post. If you are reading the book on the Kindle Fire, Amazon’s latest color tablet eReader, the answer is ‘I don’t know,’ because the Fire does not display page numbers—yet, at least.  You read books on the Fire with the Android version of the Kindle...

Dave will be following up this post (sooner, I hope) with a more technical (once again, I hope) review of the new Kindle Fire, comparing it to its B&W siblings, touchy and otherwise, but I have been using the Fire for a couple of weeks now and would like to weigh in with my early impressions. First let me say that in the world of gadgets, so much depends on timing and expectations.  If the Fire had come out before the iPad, we would have said ‘This is an incredible device….’  As it is, Apple got the first-est with the most-est and set the bar (and price) incredibly high, so the...