Kindle Paperwhite for Dummies (26 page)
Read Kindle Paperwhite for Dummies Online
Authors: Leslie H. Nicoll
Tags: #Computers, #Hardware, #Mobile Devices, #General
When you order an e-book from Amazon, even if it is free, it appears as a purchase with a purchase price of $0.00. You receive a confirmation e-mail, too, so don’t be surprised. Yes, you have “bought” the e-book, even if you didn’t have to pay anything for it. Free books from Amazon re stored in the Cloud and available to you, even if the free promotion ends.
Read the fine print carefully. Many free offers are restricted to certain countries or territories. Make sure the price is listed as $0.00 before you opt to buy.
In addition to Amazon, here are a number of sites where you can find free e-books, all available to you legally:
Project Gutenberg:
One of the original free e-book sites, Project Gutenberg, atwww.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page, includes 40,000 books that have been digitized with the help of thousands of dedicated volunteers. All e-books were originally published by bona fide publishers; the copyrights have since expired. You can search by author or title, or browse by category, by most recently updated, or by Top 100. Project Gutenberg includes e-books in languages other than English, ranging from Afrikaans to Yiddish.
Internet Archive:
This site features millions of rare, out-of-print works in multiple languages and formats. It’s especially useful for academic work. Visitwww.archive.org/details/texts.
Open Library:
This site, athttp://openlibrary.org, includes 20 million user-contributed items and over 1 million e-books in multiple editions and formats. Their goal is “One web page for every book ever published.”
FreeTechBooks.com:
This site lists free online computer science, engineering, and programming e-books, e-textbooks, and lecture notes, which are all legally and freely available over the Internet. Go tohttp://freetechbooks.com.
manybooks.net:
You can find classic texts athttp://manybooks.netthat are copyright-free, ranging from
Alice in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll (CreateSpace) to
Zambesi Expedition
by David Livingstone (Kessinger Publishing). You can also find new fiction by emerging authors. All the texts offered on the site are free to U.S. users. Most titles are offered in a variety of formats, including AZW, which works on the Kindle Paperwhite.
Feedbooks:
This site is another source of free, public domain e-books. Visitwww.feedbooks.com/publicdomain.
The Feedbooks website includes a section with paid content. These e-books are
not
compatible with the Kindle Paperwhite, so don’t purchase one in error! Only the free public domain e-books at Feedbooks work on your Kindle Paperwhite.
DRM and piracy
Digital Rights Management (DRM)
is a method for securing digital content so that an e-book (or music file or whatever else) can be read or used only on an authorized device.
When Amazon first started selling Kindle e-books, they were encoded so that they were specific to the device. Authors who sold through their Desktop Publishing (DTP) platform were required to upload DRM-encrypted files. The DTP requirements have since been eased so that DRM is no longer required.
A discussion of the ethics of DRM is beyond the scope of this e-book. Just know that before you buy an e-book from a site other than Amazon, make sure that the format is compatible with your Kindle Paperwhite and isn’t encoded in such a way that would render the e-book unreadable.
Piracy is the other side of the DRM coin — or what DRM is trying to prevent. If a file isn’t encoded, it can be shared freely with any number of other readers.
Piracy
is stealing e-books and taking money out of the pocket of the author and publisher. Please don’t engage in this illegal activity.
Chapter 7
Adding Documents
In This Chapter
Understanding Kindle-friendly file formats
Transferring documents from your computer
Sending files from a desktop, a browser, or an Android device
Sending documents by e-mail
Viewing PDFs on your Kindle Paperwhite
Paying fees to transfer documents
A
fter you’ve had your Kindle Paperwhite for a while, you’re sure to have downloaded e-books from the Kindle Store or from other online sources. But what if you want to read some of your own content on your Kindle Paperwhite? Most people have a massive collection of materials from work or school, reference manuals, lists, maps, correspondence, creative writing, and other personal documents on their computers.Wouldn’t it be nice to have some of that content available on your Kindle Paperwhite as you travel or go about your daily life?
Or what if you’re surfing the web and you see an interesting article or blog post and think to yourself, “I’d like to put that on my Kindle Paperwhite to read later.” Guess what? You can! Amazon and the Kindle Paperwhite have some new tools to allow you to do this quickly and easily.
In this chapter, we explore how to put your own documents onto your Kindle Paperwhite. We also discuss how to create documents that you might acquire from other sources. We cover some handy services and tools to send compatible files to your Kindle Paperwhite, and to convert documents so that they’re readable on your device.
Transferring Kindle-Friendly File Formats
Your Kindle Paperwhite can’t read every file that’s on your computer. A file has to be in a Kindle-compatible format so that the device can display it. The following list describes the Kindle-friendly file types:
AZW, AZW1, AZW2, AZW3
are Kindle formats; most files you download from the Kindle Store are in these formats.
MOBI,
a file format developed by Mobipocket, is widely used and compatible with the Kindle Paperwhite. Note, however, that secure Mobipocket or secure MOBI files do
not
work on a Kindle Paperwhite.
PRC
is equivalent to MOBI and is the standard file format for the Kindle family of e-readers.
TXT
is a simple text file, such as those you might create with Notepad.
PDF:
Your Kindle Paperwhite can display files in Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF).
Files in these formats are generally readable
natively
— that is, without needing to be converted — by your Kindle Paperwhite. So all you have to do is transfer the files onto your Kindle Paperwhite, as we describe in the next section.
Copying Files from Your Computer
If your file is in one of the Kindle-compatible formats listed in the preceding section, you can transfer it directly from your computer to your Kindle Paperwhite via USB.
To transfer the files, follow these steps:
1. Connect your Kindle Paperwhite to your computer using the USB cable.
Your computer recognizes your Kindle Paperwhite when it’s plugged in and displays the Kindle Paperwhite as a removable drive, as shown in Figure 7-1. If you go to My Computer (PC) or Finder (Mac), your Kindle Paperwhite appears as a drive.
