Sorry if asked before but can you create essentially books yourself on the PC and save them out in some format that a Kindle will read and treat as a book ??

Was thinking of re-typing up the kids short books and maybe encourage them to read more by reading them also on a Kindle (of wife's if I get her one)

thanks,

Yes, have a read of this
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/cust...deId=200493090

You can either transfer documents by USB connection or email them to your Kindle

Yeah just write them out in MS Word and save them as a PDF. Then drag and drop via the supplied USB cable or email it to the device with the provided email address.

Do you have to convert them to pdf or can you save them directly as doc, docx, rtf or txt files?

Any text I want to put on my Kindle I put into a txt file then copy and paste it into the document folder when my Kindle is plugged into my computer. I've never had a problem with being able to open the file and read it doing it like that.

MS Word 2007 and 2010 has the ability to save as PDF, use that feature.

If not save as .txt but you will lose most of your formatting.

Kindle won't reflow PDF files though, which means zooming and scrolling, so you may take the next step and either use Calibre to convert the documents to MOBI and transfer them with USB cable or use your free.kindle.com email address and let them convert the files for you.

cool sounds promising then for reading my own documents. thanks

Indeed just make your document in MS word 85x114 mm with no margins (kindle adds margins) and it should work fine.

I created this detailed guide on this forum about a year ago.

I hope it is of use to some people.

May have changed since then.

I sold my Kindle on eBay for £6 less than the Amazon price (some people amaze me!) and am going to wait until colour ones are cheap enough.

What does that mean in English? I'm hoping to get a Kindle for Xmas, and I'd like to transfer all my .PDF instruction manuals to it. Will I be able to do this easily?

I don't know whether it's relevant, but I don't have Word, just Works.

I didn't think there were any colour ones? - don't colour ones use completely different technology, not really ebook friendly.

Yes, don't you need to push out the boat and buy an iPad if you want colour.

As is mentioned above and elsewhere you seem to be able to upload pdf files directly. I think that your problem is more likely to be the size of the files. If they're instruction manuals then presumably they're likely to be full of images that will bump up the file size. I believe that the Kindle memory is only 2GB, more than ample for lots of text files, but not so generous for images - I'd suggest checking the size of your pdf manuals and doing a bit of arithmetic.

Indeed, e-ink have colour screens called Triton but there isn't any devices using it yet. No doubt we will start to see them next year.

I have 24 PDF files, totalling 99.3 MB, and some can probably be ignored or deleted. Do I take it I can just copy and paste them? It was your use of the word "reflow" I didn't understand.

Use Calibre to convert to kindle's mobi format ........ then download via usb lead .........

Your pdf files will likely be formatted for a page size other than that native to the kindle. You can copy & paste the files, but they will not automatically 'reflow' to display nicely on the kindle screen - you will need to cursor around & possibly zoom in/out to read the pages once they have transferred.

However, as said, you can get Amazon to convert them via the kindle email address you were allocated - although there may be a charge for this??

Or, you can convert to mobi format using Calibre.

I've not tried those options, so can't comment further on which is best..

Reflow means to reformat the text word by word so it fits the page area you have, rather than just plonking an image of the original page on your screen that might not fit and be hard to read.

Kindle has 4G

Calibre - free software - will convert pdf to mobi, then on kindle you can select font size u want, & zoom in on pictures!

pdfs with just a few pictures normally convert ok to mobi.

More complicated pdfs may be better left AS pdfs, but only limited zoom on kindle 3 (and less on touch!)

Kindle has 4G memory

Calibre - free software - will convert pdf to mobi, then on kindle you can select font size u want, & zoom in on pictures!

pdfs with just a few pictures normally convert ok to mobi.

More complicated pdfs may be better left AS pdfs, but only limited zoom on kindle 3 (and less on touch!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibre_%28software%29

Load calibre software onto your computer, install it, drag pdf file into input box, set "convert to mobi format", that's basically it (there's various tweaks you can fiddle with) .........

Thanks for all the replies; I'll download Calibre this week.

According to Click our Korean friends (who else) have very expensive prototypes. I'm happy to wait.

I had loads of PDF files (IT technical manuals) which I transferred to my Kindle. Unfortunately, owing to the size of the screen and my 50 year old eyes, I couldn't quite manage to read the text without glasses and I don't want to mess around with zooming and I hate the inconvenience of glasses. So, I'll make sure I get a bigger screen next time (or try one out before I buy).

Access Inside Out is 1289 pages and takes up 23.4M. That is an enormous book but you could get 87 of them on a Kindle.

How many paper books do you read that are in colour?.

I've got thousands of paper books, I don't think ANY of them are in colour?.

Essentially if you're wanting colour, you're not really looking for an ebook reader.