If you’re like most people, you probably use your Kindle to read books, magazines, and newspapers. But did you know that you can also use your Kindle to get more out of it? Here are some tips, tricks, hacks, and free books to help you get the most from your Kindle.
- Use Your Kindle as a Digital Bookshelf: If you have a lot of books that you want to read but don’t have enough space on your shelf, consider using your Kindle as a digital bookshelf. You can store all of your books in one place and access them from anywhere with an internet connection. This is great if you travel a lot or if you have a large library at home that you don’t want to take with you on vacation.
- Use Your Kindle as an eReader: If all you want is to read one book at a time, consider using your Kindle as an eReader. This means that the screen will turn off after each page is read so that other people in the room can still use the device without being disturbed. This is great if you’re trying to keep the peace while reading in bed or if someone else is sleeping and they don’t want to be disturbed by noise from the TV or computer.
- Use Your Kindle for Reference Material: If there’s something specific that you need help understanding but don’t have time to go look it up online, try using your Kindle for reference material. You can open up any book that you’ve downloaded onto your device and start reading right away without having to search for where it starts on the page or flip through pages looking for information that’s relevant to what you’re looking for.
- Download Free Books: One of the best ways to get more out of your Kindle is by downloading free books from Amazon Prime Reading or barnesandnoble Nook Reading apps. These apps offer hundreds of free books every month so there’s always something ..
If you have an ebook reader chances are it’s a Kindle. Today we’re taking a look at ways you can get more from your Kindle using built-in tools, experimental features, and third-party software. Read on to supercharge your Kindle experience.
You might have bought your Kindle, used it to buy some titles from the Kindle store, and thought that’s all there was to Kindle ownership. Millions of Kindle owners are perfectly happy with that arrangement but you can squeeze much more life and enjoyment out of your Kindle by digging into the device, employing third party hacks and software bundles, and more.
Jailbreak Your Kindle for Custom Screensavers
Jailbreaking your Kindle doesn’t give you quite the range of tools and abilities that jailbreaking an iPhone does but it’s still a pretty neat trick to really customize your Kindle to fit your personality. On my Kindle, for example, I replaced the default screensaver with a large collection of pinup paintings by American pinup artist Gil Elvgren (pack available here) and on my wife’s Kindle I replaced it with a collection of Wonder Woman art (pack available here).
You can follow our guide to jailbreaking your Kindle here (and keep up on the world of Kindle jailbreaking here for the latest and greatest hacks). Creating your own screensaver images is easy; we detail how in our guide. If you’d prefer to custom without the work of cropping and scaling your own images make sure to check out some of the online Kindle wallpaper depots like this Kindle wallpaper Tumblr and KindleScreensavers, as well as searching Google for Kindle-friendly images like so.
Format Non-Kindle Store Books for the Kindle
Formatting Manga for Crisp and Easy Reading on Your Kindle
Perhaps your problem isn’t that you want to convert one book format to another book format but that you want to read picture-based literature on your Kindle. Many Manga fans notice, for instance, that the Kindle is roughly the size of a Manga trade paperback and that the grayscale screen is a great match for the grayscale of Manga artwork.
The match seemed like such a perfect fit that one Manga fan even created a program called Mangle to help Manga (and comic book) fans optimize their collections for reading on the Kindle. You can check out our guide to using the application here. Even if you’re not a Manga fan, Mangle is an awesome application for optimizing your Kindle screensavers. When we ran it through our collection it shaved the size by 40+% without any noticeable loss in quality.
Score Thousands of Free Books Online
This tip isn’t Kindle-specific, but it’s worth mentioning here. Although the Kindle Store has a large free and discounted books section (if you haven’t checked it out yet and you’re a Kindle owner, you really should) there are many other places to find free books online—and you won’t even have to hoist the Jolly Roger to get them.
Catalogs of public works, book giveaways, and more all contribute to the pool of free books available. Check out our guide to finding free books across the web here.
Access Your Ebook Collection Anywhere in the World
The Kindle’s 4GB storage capacity is more than enough to hold thousands of books but if you’re a dedicated bibliophile you never want to be without your books, right?
Never find yourself settled into a lounge chair at your favorite resort only to discover you forgot to copy the books over from your computer to your Kindle. Calibre, the awesome ebook management application we promoted earlier in this guide to help with book conversions, also has a sweet media server built in that will help you link your Kindle (or other ebook reader) to your ebook library wherever you may roam. You can read all about configuring the media server here.
Convert Web Articles for Your Kindle
Reading books on the Kindle is great but there’s no need to limit yourself. You can both browse the web and read web-based articles from your Kindle and, from the comfort of your computer, send articles wirelessly and neatly converted to your Kindle.
The first method requires no outside effort. Navigate on your Kindle to Menu –> Experimental –> Web Browser and then punch in the address of a site you want to read articles on. When you find an article you want to read then all you have to do is hit the Enter key and navigate the zoom pane that appears to highlight the body of the article (instead of the ads, sidebars, and such). Press the Menu button again and select Article Mode. The Kindle will zoom and reformat the text for you. It’s not perfect but it works pretty darn well most of the time. You can see the results in the screenshot above.
Alternatively you can take advantage of the Kindle delivery service. Your Kindle has a unique email address that you can email files to. These files are then converted and wirelessly transferred to your Kindle. You can read about how to identify and use your Kindle email address here. Once you know what your Kindle email address is you can use the awesome Kindlability bookmark to zip articles right from your desktop browser to your Kindle.
Update Social Media Accounts from Your Kindle
Although nobody is going to toss aside their smartphone to start browsing Facebook from their Kindle, you can push social media updates from your Kindle to both Twitter and Facebook. The entire setup is designed to make it easy to share snippets of text from books you are reading. If you’re interested in playing around with it navigate to Menu –> Settings –> Social Networks –> Manage. There you can authorize your Kindle to access both your Twitter and Facebook account. The sharing is fairly primitive and would, ideally, share a tiny URL to the book you’re talking about, but for now you’re limited to sharing quotes from the book that can be appended with a custom message.
Play Games on Your Kindle
Your Kindle is no smartphone and there’s no chance at all you’ll be convinced of that by the quality of the games on it. None the less there are some little Easter Egg games hidden on the Kindle. From the main screen you can press ALT+SHIFT+M to load up Mine Sweeper. Once you’ve loaded up Mine Sweeper you can press the G key to load up a copy of GoMoku. You’re not going to get confused and think you’re playing Angry Birds but if you’re taking a break from reading a dense novel it’s a nice little distraction.
Have a Kindle tip, trick, or hack to share that we didn’t cover here? Have a collection of tricks to share for other popular ebook readers? Sound off in the comments and share your wisdom with your fellow readers.
