Confessions of a Kindle User Part 2

Yesterday, we looked at the features and functionality of Amazon’s Kindle. Today, we look at how to acquire books for reading on the Kindle.

Shopping for books on Amazon is easy. You can do it from your PC or from your Kindle. The Kindle is equipped with a wireless connection from AT&T that allows you to shop from your Kindle and have the book delivered wirelessly. This connection costs you nothing. You can also buy a book on your PC and it will be wirelessly delivered the next time you turn your Kindle on. As a side note, turn off the wireless when not using it and you will extend the life of the battery.

Not sure whether or not you want a particular book? Amazon lets you download a sample of that book for free. Usually it is the first chapter or two. Then, if you like it, you can download the entire book as described above.

As for book costs, well let me tell you, for all the books that are on my Kindle, including those that I have erased after reading them, I have spent about $20. There are literally thousands and thousand of books available for free, even new books.

Amazon themselves offer about 80 free current books at any one time…sometimes they last for about a month, other times for only a few hours. But, there are many other sites that offer free books of all kinds. My favorite place to search is manybooks.net and inkmesh.com…the latter also has a link that connects you to Kindle’s latest free books that is updated hourly.

There are two other items, both free, I recommend you download to make your Kindle experience even better. First is “Kindle for the PC.” It is a software program for your computer that is a Kindle reader. You will often need it to download books from non-Amazon sources. It is quite easy to transfer your books from the PC Kindle software directly into your Kindle.

And, here is a sneaky trick for folks that don’t use a Kindle or any other reader for that matter. First, download the Kindle for PC application, then download a sample of a book you are thinking about purchasing. If you like what you see, you can get the dead tree edition of the book and be assured it is what you want. Just a thought.

The other item to get is a wonderful program that you can use to organize your book collection AND convert different types of e-books into other types…in my case, the Kindle. The program is called “Calibre” and is free. It does a fabulous job of converting other formats to Kindle. But it will also do the same thing for most other eBook formats. So if you have a Barnes and Noble Nook or Sony Reader, Calibre will work for you also.

The Kindle uses a format called “Mobi” that is exclusive for the Kindle. But there are many, many books published in the ePub and PDF formats. While Kindle will read a PDF document, it doesn’t do it well. It is much better to convert the PDF (or Word, or HTML document) to the Kindle format. Calibre is not the only eBook converter, but it is the best by far.

Conversion is a simple process. After converting a book, Calibre will load it into your Kindle if your are connected via USB. Calibre is a very useful utility and highly recommended for any eBook reader.

Well those are my thoughts on the Kindle and eBook readers in general. As I said earlier, I love reading and storing books this way. Although you can’t try out a Kindle without ordering it, you can head over to your nearest Barnes and Noble store and try out their “Nook” to see if you like using an eBook reader. You might be surprised.