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Ultimate Guide To Amazon Kindle 3rd Edition UK PDF

The latest additions to Amazon's Kindle line-up are perhaps the most exciting since the company's first forays into digital reading. The range now includes five different products: the e-ink-based Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite. The Kindle Fire and its siblings let you install your own applications on a fully fledged tablet platform. If you haven't yet bought an e-reader, there's never been a better time to take the plunge.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)

546 views132 pages

Ultimate Guide To Amazon Kindle 3rd Edition UK PDF

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Includ

Fire H es
D
range! X

Ultimate Guide to the New Kindle Family

BUYER'S GUIDE | TUTORIALS | HIDDEN FEATURES

PLUS LEARN HOW TO PUBLISH YOUR OWN EBOOK

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Lets get reading...

he latest additions to
Amazons Kindle line-up are
perhaps the most exciting
since the companys rst forays
into digital reading.
The range now includes ve
dierent products: the e-ink-based
Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite,
and the LCD-based Kindle Fire,
Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Fire
HDX. Each has access to Amazons
enormous library of ebooks, while
the latter three the Kindle Fire
and its siblings let you install
your own applications on a fully
edged tablet platform.
If you havent yet bought an
e-reader, theres never been a
better time to take the plunge.
Not only are digital books cheaper
than most printed editions, but
the prices of e-readers themselves
are falling. The entry-level
Kindle costs just
69 in the
UK and $69
in the US, has
a sharp screen,
a long-running
battery and
enough memory
for you to carry
around 1,400 books
at a time, providing
a lifetime of reading

in just one slim device, no fatter

than a pencil. If you often nd
yourself travelling, its a far more
convenient option for keeping
yourself entertained than carrying
a stack of physical books.
If youre an old hand, though,
you might be wondering what
Amazon could be doing that would
induce you to upgrade.
Well, its good news here, too.
The new devices have updated
operating systems, with the
Kindle Paperwhite giving access
to exciting features like X-Ray,
which tells you more about the
characters, phrases and words
in compatible books by
cross-referencing
the whole

volume. This makes keeping track

of whos who in a weighty tome
far easier, and its great for fans of
lengthy sagas and ongoing series.
So, whether youre new to
the Kindle platform, or youve
been using it for years, this guide
will help you get the most out of
your e-reader, download books,
subscribe to newspapers and
magazines, and uncover hidden
features. Read on.
Nik Rawlinson

Ultimate Guide to Amazon Kindle (3rd Edition)

WRITTEN BY Nik Rawlinson
ADVERTISING
DIRECTOR Katie Wood 020 7907 6689
ACCOUNT MANAGER Simone Daws 020 7907 6617
DENNIS PUBLISHING LTD
MAGBOOK PUBLISHER Dharmesh Mistry
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The MagBook brand is a trademark of Dennis Publishing

Ltd., 30 Cleveland St, London W1T 4JD. Company
registered in England. All material Dennis Publishing
Ltd, licensed by Felden 2013, and may not be reproduced
in whole or part without the consent of the publishers.
Ultimate Guide to Amazon Kindle (3rd Edition)
ISBN 1-78106-266-8

LIABILITY
While every care was taken during the production of this MagBook, the publishers cannot be held responsible for the accuracy
of the information or any consequence arising from it. Dennis Publishing takes no responsibility for the companies advertising
in this MagBook. The paper used within this MagBook is produced from sustainable bre, manufactured by mills with a valid
chain of custody. Printed at Polestar Bicester.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Contents
Reading with
your Kindle

Buying your rst Kindle

Choosing the right Kindle

for your needs

Kindle Fire HDX

Kindle competitors

Kindle

Kindle Paperwhite

Kindle Fire HD
26

Buying books directly using

your Kindle

Registering your new Kindle

Keeping your Kindle

password protected

Buying books through your

PC or Mac browser

Removing a Kindle from

your Amazon account

Transferring books to your

Kindle using USB

Alternative bookstores

Listening to audiobooks

Highlighting text and

posting to social networks

Backing up your Kindle

purchases

Reading Kindle books

without using your Kindle

Organising books on an
e-ink Kindle

Vocabulary Builder on
Kindle Paperwhite

Exploring books with

Kindle X-Ray

Improved reference tools on

Kindle Paperwhite

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Kindle hacks

Kindle Fire

Publishing your own

Kindle book

Kindle Fire, Kindle Fire HD

and Kindle Fire HDX

Hidden Kindle features

Sending documents to your

Kindle wirelessly

Kindle Fire HD/HDX

orientation

Getting your Kindle Fire HD

and HDX online using Wi-Fi

Setting up your Kindle Fire

HD and HDX

Subscribing to newspapers
and magazines on your
Kindle

Managing your Kindle

remotely

Getting content onto

(and o ) your Kindle Fire

Setting up your Kindle to

sync with Instapaper

100

Setting up your email

102

Purchasing and organising

Kindle Fire applications

106

Buying and renting videos

on Kindle Fire

108

Downloading, organising
and playing music

Kindle Fire and Amazons

online Cloud Services

111

Using Amazon Cloud Player

to synchronise your music

116

Using Amazon Cloud Drive

Kindle xer
122

Kindle troubleshooter

126

Glossary

Buying
your
rst
Kindle

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

KINDLE FIRE RETIRED
Amazon retired the Kindle Fire after two generations in the autumn of 2013.
At the time of writing, it remained on its site, but you could only buy it through
third-party outlets or on the second-hand market. Nonetheless, if you can source
one, it remains a very sturdy and aordable tablet that gives you access to much
of Amazons best content and a wide choice of Android applications.

Turn the page

for full reviews

Kindle Fire

Kindle Fire HD

Kindle Fire HDX

7in

7in/8.9in

Screen size

Colour LCD

Display technology

1,024 x 600 pixels

1,280 x 800/1,920 x 1,200

1,920 x 1,200/2,560 x 1,600

Resolution

Stereo speakers

Stereo speakers with Dolby

processing

Stereo speakers with

Dolby processing

Audio

US /Wi-Fi

Connectivity

8G , 16G or 32G

16G , 32G or 64G

Storage

18.9 x 12 x 1.15cm

Up to 23.9 x 16.3 x 0.9cm

Up to 23.1 x 15.7 x 0.8cm

Dimensions

400g

395567g

303384g

Weight

Almost 9 hours
continuous use

Over 11 hours
continuous use

Over 10 hours
continuous use

Battery life

2-point
multitouch screen

10-point
multitouch screen

Interface

119

199

Price from

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Kindle

he entry-level Kindle is the

cheapest e-reader Amazon
has ever produced, and it
gets better with every update.
Its easy to see how the
company has managed to make
this model of Kindle so aordable:
its seriously stripped down when
compared to its siblings, with
neither a hardware keyboard nor a
touch-sensitive display on oer.
Theres no 3G option here,
either, so if you dont have a
wireless network at home youll
have to either buy your books
wirelessly on a public network or
download them to your computer
and transfer them using the
bundled USB cable. Theres also
no plug in the box, so if you dont
want to buy one as an optional
extra youll have to charge your
device by plugging it into a spare
port on your computer.
American shoppers can cut
the cost of buying this most
basic of all Kindles still further
by opting for the version with
what Amazon calls special
oers. This translates to adverts,
which are displayed on the
homescreen and in place of the
images that are shown when the
Kindle is switched o. The oers
dont appear within the pages

KINDLE QUICK FACTS

Screen size ..
..
Display technology
Resolution ..
..
Audio.
..
..
..
Connectivity ..
..
Internal storage ..
Dimensions ..
..
Weight ..
..
..
Battery life ..
..
Interface ..
..
..

..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..

..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
6in
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. e-ink
..
..
..
..
.. 167 pixels per inch
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. None
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. Wi-Fi/USB
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. 2GB
..
..
..
.. 16.5 x 11.4 x 0.87cm
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. 170g
..
..
..
..
..
.. Up to 1 month
Multiway controller plus side buttons

of your books, so they wont

interrupt your reading, and they
are genuinely useful in many
cases, with past oers including
Kindle books for $1 or savings
of up to $500 on high-denition
televisions. These oers arent

currently available outside of the

US, where shoppers have to pay
the full price for their device.
It has a 6in e-ink screen,
which is great in bright light but,
as is the case with a physical
printed book, less eective in

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

dimmer surroundings. The latest
generation of Kindles have a very
fast screen refresh rate 15%
faster than their predecessors
which largely overcomes the
problem of the ash you see when
turning a page.
Amazon has also tuned the
onscreen fonts used in the latest
generation of Kindles to give them
smoother edges and a darker,
more impactful appearance, which
should make for a more pleasant
reading experience, particularly if
you use your Kindle for extended
periods. If that sounds like you
then youll also be pleased
with how light and thin it is;
a pencil is thicker than this
diminutive device.
Although this model has
the lowest storage capacity of
any Kindle in the range, it will
nonetheless allow you to carry
1,400 books at any one time,
which should be more than
enough for even the longest
holiday or career break. It also
has the lowest-powered battery,
yet can keep running for a month
on a single charge so long as you
read for around half an hour a day
and keep the wireless networking
features switched o, the only
eect of which would be that
your current page position and
bookmarks wont be synced.
As with the other Kindles, it
can download books in less than
60 seconds and theyll be backed
up in Amazons cloud system so
you can download your purchases
again in the future whenever you
choose. It has adjustable text sizes

and three fonts to choose from,

and can share highlights and notes
online, so long as youre prepared
to use the multiway controller to
hunt about the onscreen keyboard
when tapping out your jottings.
It doesnt take long to get used
to working this way, though, and
youll soon forget that you dont
have a proper physical keyboard
with which to work.

Kindle Keyboard killed

The new 2013 Kindle line-up
has one notable omission:
the Kindle keyboard. This
long-standing member of the
range has nally disappeared.
All text input now takes place
through an onscreen keyboard,
navigated on the basic Kindle
using the multiway controller.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Kindle Paperwhite

ne step up from the basic

Kindle is the Kindle
Paperwhite. At rst,
it appears to be very similar to
the entry-level device, but look
more closely and youll see that
its dropped the buttons that
appear on the panel at the bottom
of its siblings front surface, as
well as the forwards and back
page-turning buttons that sit one
above the other on either side of
the body. To use it, you instead
interact directly with the screen,
as you would with a regular tablet
device, tapping either side to turn
from page to page.
This will appeal to many
users as its a way of working
that were all now becoming used
to thanks to the proliferation

KINDLE PAPERWHITE QUICK FACTS

Screen size ..
..
Display technology
Resolution ..
..
Audio.
..
..
..
Connectivity ..
..
Internal storage ..
Dimensions ..
..
Weight ..
..
..
Battery life ..
..
Interface ..
..
..

..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..

of smartphones that rely on us

swiping and tapping the screen
to control their various functions.
Interacting directly with the pages
is also much more similar to the
way we handle traditional printed
books, so it may be just enough

E-INK VS LCD
You might wonder why youd buy an e-ink Kindle when you could
bag yourself a full-colour Kindle Fire. The Fire has its attractions
particularly the ability to install fully edged Android apps but e-ink
has many benets if youll spend more of your time reading than
anything else. For starters, the experience is far more like reading
paper, and it has a wider viewing angle, which means you may nd it
more comfortable to hold an e-ink Kindle than an LCD one as you dont
have to worry about shifting colours and reections. Theres also some
evidence to suggest that e-ink doesnt aect your sleep patterns the
way that LCD can in some people, which is good news for anyone who
enjoys reading their Kindle last thing at night to help them nod o.

..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..

..
..
..
..
..
6in
..
..
..
..
.. e-ink
..
.. 212 pixels per inch
..Built-in stereo speakers
..
..
.. Wi-Fi/USB/3G
..
..
..
..
.. 2GB
.. 16.9 x 11.7 x 0.91cm
..
..
..
.. 213222g
..
..
..
.. 2 months
.. Touch-sensitive screen

to tempt the Kindle doubters into

making the switch.
Buttons aside, it diers in
one very important way to the
basic Kindle in that the screen is
lit, so you can read it in the dark
perfect if you share a bed with
someone who tends to turn over
and go to sleep before you.
This illumination is
implemented in a very dierent
way to the light that runs behind
the screen on the Kindle Fire,
which instead uses an LCD
display. The Paperwhite, which
still uses e-ink combined with the
illuminated panel, should prove
to be more relaxing when read for
extended periods and shouldnt
have any eect on your ability to
sleep soundly after staring at it for

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

some time, as some claim is the
case with LCD-based devices.
The Paperwhite has sucient
internal capacity to hold around
1,100 books, as 1.25GB of the
installed 2GB remains free for use
once the operating system has
been accounted for. Its a greyscale
device, capable of dierentiating
between 16 dierent levels of grey,
which might not sound like much,
but when you take into account
the fact that it dithers each of
these tones in a pattern to imitate
a far broader spectrum its actually
very eective. In recent versions
of the Kindle, Amazon has also
worked hard to smooth the edges
of its onscreen text and improve
its contrast for a more pleasant
reading experience all round.
The battery is more
powerful than the one
found in the plain Kindle,
and in regular use, which
Amazon counts as being
around half an hour of
reading a day with the
wireless networking
features turned o and
the backlight set to level 10,
you can expect to get around two
months use out of a single charge.
It isnt shipped with a power
adaptor, so youll have to either
charge it by plugging it into
an available USB port on your
computer or buy an optional
adaptor add-on. Charging through
a USB port takes around four
hours to complete. Using the
optional charger is quicker.
The Kindle Paperwhite is the
only e-ink device in the family

10
16 9to
9

to feature 3G connectivity in
addition to regular Wi-Fi. That
means you can download books
on the move and access your
content through your free account
on Amazons online Cloud Drive.
There are no monthly charges
for staying connected, but the
up-front cost is higher than for the
Wi-Fi-only edition.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Kindle Fire HD

fter the success of the

original Kindle Fire, it was
only natural that Amazon
would want to try and broaden out
the range. Over the last couple of
years, therefore, its released
the Fire HD and Fire HD 8.9
and, most recently, the Kindle
Fire HDX.
The regular Kindle Fire HD
sports a resolution of 1,280 x 800
pixels on a 7in display the same
size as the old Kindle Fire, which
has since been retired, but with
considerably more pixels. The
8.9in model ups the resolution
to 1,920 x 1,200, at which point
it matches many desktop
monitors.
Under the hood, youll nd
a choice of capacities, with
integrated ash memory running
to either 8GB or 16GB on the
regular 7in device, and a choice
of either 16GB or 32GB on the
larger 8.9in model.
The Kindle Fire HD is such a
fun device that it makes sense to
buy the highest capacity device
you can aord so that you have
plenty of room for apps and
media. This is less the case on
the traditional e-ink Kindles,
on which youll spend more time
on a smaller number of media

KINDLE FIRE HD QUICK FACTS

Screen size ..
..
Display technology
Resolution ..
..
Audio.
..
..
..
Connectivity ..
..
Internal storage ..
Dimensions ..
..
Weight ..
..
..
Battery life ..
..
Interface ..
..
..

..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. 7in/8.9in
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. LCD
.. 1,280 x 800/1,920 x 1,200 pixel display
Built-in stereo speakers with Dolby output
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. Wi-Fi/USB
..
..
..
..
..
..8GB, 16GB or 32GB
..
..
..
.. from 19.3 x 13.7 x 1.3cm
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. from 395g
..
..
..
..
.. 1012 hours on Wi-Fi
..
..
..
..
..
. 10-point multitouch

items, as you use them mainly

for reading.
If most of what youll be doing
involves browsing the web and
dealing with your email, however,
the lower-capacity device will
probably suit you ne, but bear
in mind that youll also have

less space for applications that

you download from the Amazon
Appstore.
The basic Kindle Fire HD is
slightly larger than the old 7in
Kindle Fire that it replaced, and
it weighs more, too, but much
of this additional bulk is more

than oset by the increased

battery life of up to 11
hours per charge and
a multitouch screen,
which is sensitive to 10
points, rather than the
two points on the device
it replaces.
Amazon is rightly
making much of the fact
that the Kindle Fire HD
has two powerful speakers
built in with exclusive Dolby
Digital audio, which will make
the Fire HD the best choice of
all of Amazons various portable
oerings for enjoying movie
and TV content along with
singles and albums downloaded
from the store and stored in your
Amazon Cloud account.
The larger 8.9in Kindle Fire
HD has optional 4G connectivity
on top of the built-in wireless
networking, which will allow you
to download books and other
content when away from your
network.
The latest additions to
each range feature Fire OS
3.0, Amazons latest take on
the Android operating system.
Codenamed Mohito, this adds
various cloud services, faster
access to your applications and
information, easier content
management, and improved
accessibility features for blind and
visually impaired users.
The most exciting of these
new features are the extension of
the existing X-Ray system that
works with books on the Kindle
Paperwhite to movies, TV and

from

11
9

music, which allows you to display

music lyrics in songs, see which
tracks are playing while youre
watching a lm, and read trivia
and backstories for visual media.
You can now print direct from
a Kindle Fire HD, and mute all
notications and reminders,
which will be useful both when
you head to bed and when
youre viewing a lm or listening
to audiobooks.

The Kindle Fire HD is

a true power users device
and signicantly dierent to
the e-ink-based Kindles. If you
primarily intend to read books,
rather than enjoy music, movies
and TV shows, check out the
traditional models, too. If you see
yourself as a tablet connoisseur,
though, be sure to see whether
upgrading to the Kindle Fire HDX,
which we prole over the page,
would better suit your needs.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Kindle Fire HDX

he Kindle Fire HDX currently

sits at the very top of the
full-colour Kindle tablet
line-up. Like the Kindle Fire HD
(and the vanilla Kindle Fire that
came before it), the Fire HDX
is an LCD-based device with a
backlit screen rather than the
reective e-ink technology used
in the regular Kindle and Kindle
Paperwhite.
Its built around a modied
version of Googles Android
operating system for tablets
and smartphones, which means
you can extend its abilities by
downloading applications. These
must come from Amazons
own Appstore rather than the
mainstream Google Play store.
Kindle Fire HDX is available
in two sizes, with screens of 7in
and 8.9in. Each has the same
resolution as the equivalent screen
on the Kindle Fire HD. However,
where the 7in Fire HD is lacking a
front-facing camera, both the 7in
and 8.9in Fire HDX devices sport
one, which means you can use
even the smaller tablets for taking
photos and streaming outgoing
video when making video calls
using applications like Skype.
Although they may initially
look broadly similar, the

KINDLE FIRE HDX QUICK FACTS

Screen size ..
..
Display technology
Resolution ..
..
Audio.
..
..
..
Connectivity ..
..
Internal storage ..
Dimensions ..
..
Weight ..
..
..
Battery life ..
..
Interface ..
..
..

..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. 7in/8.9in
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. LCD
.. 1,280 x 800/1,920 x 1,200 pixel display
Built-in stereo speakers with Dolby output
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. Wi-Fi/USB
..
..
..
..
.. 16GB, 32GB or 64GB
..
..
..
.. from 18.6 x 12.8 x 0.9cm
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. from 303g
..
..
..
..
.. 1112 hours on Wi-Fi
..
..
..
..
..
. 10-point multitouch

Kindle Fire HDX duo represent

a signicant upgrade when
compared directly with the two
Fire HD products, and not just
where the cameras concerned.
For starters, they run on
quad- core 2.2GHz processors,
rather than the dual-core 1.5GHz

chips in the Fire HD, which means

that theyre not only natively faster
but can split their workload across
twice as many brains for more
ecient processing.
The lowest memory allocation
is 16GB twice the entry-level
amount on the Kindle Fire HD

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

and on both devices runs all
the way up to 64GB, which again
doubles what you can access on
the Kindle Fire HD. Considering
you cant increase the internal
memory once youve bought your
device it often makes sense with a
tablet to buy the most capacious
device you can aord right from
the outset on the basis that its
likely to meet your needs for
longer, which immediately makes
the Kindle Fire HDX a more
tempting proposition.
As well as the built-in stereo
speakers and Dolby Digital
processing, both models of the
Fire HDX sport an internal

microphone essential for the

aforementioned video calling
which is missing from the 7in
Kindle Fire HD.
Perhaps the most exciting
innovation, though, isnt hardware
based at all but the emergency
help system that Amazon has
implemented in the updated
operating system underpinning
the Fire HDX. The menu bar
that runs across the top of the
screen now features a Mayday
button. Tap it and the Kindle will
open a direct connection to a real
person, which you can see in a
video window and to whom you
can speak using the integrated

microphone. These are Amazon

experts who know all about the
Kindle Fire HDX and how it
works, so they can help you x
problems, and show you how to
use key features by controlling
your screen and viewing what
youre doing with your device.
As youd imagine, all of these
advanced features mean that
the Kindle Fire HDX attracts a
premium price, with the 16GB
7in device starting at 199 with
special oers (onscreen adverts),
rising to 329 if you want the
8.9in display, 4G connectivity and
no adverts.

from

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Kindle competitors

mazons Kindle range may

well be the best-known
line-up of e-reading
devices available, but theyre
far from the only ones. Neither
was the rst Kindle the earliest
e-reader on sale: Amazons
readers have simply carved
themselves a niche as some of the
best-supported and widest-used
readers worldwide.
Choosing an e-reader is about
far more than just picking the best
hardware for your needs. As each
one is usually tied into a dedicated
online store, you should also
consider the price of the books
on sale and the size of the range
on oer. Theres no point buying
into a poorly supported platform.
Each of the e-readers in the
line-up here is well supported
by an extensive online
library, and they also use
the widely adopted ePub

format for their books, which

means its possible to buy books
from rival stores and load them
onto each one. Thats less often
the case with the Kindle, which
uses a variation on Mobipocket as
its native format and, to date, isnt
compatible with ePub.
There is an added advantage
to using ePub, which is that more
libraries support the format.
At the time of writing, library
lending is only compatible with
the Kindle in the US, meaning that
UK readers who want to borrow
books to reduce the cost will have
to opt for one of these alternatives
or take out an Amazon Prime
subscription and borrow from
Amazons own library.
Each of these devices is
available in regular retail stores,
making it easy to buy books from
traditional high-street retailers
online shops.

Sony Reader
The Sony Reader comes with a
built-in cover, and can suck up
enough power for you to read
a 600-page book with just a
three-minute charge, so its perfect
for topping up when youre in a
hurry to leave the house.
The Reader can store up
to 1,200 books in its internal
memory and has a MicroSD card
slot for expanding its capacity,
allowing you to travel with an
unlimited number of books at
your disposal.
The screen is 6in diagonally
and has a resolution of 1,024 x 758
pixels. It comes in three colours
black, red and white with a
two-month battery life, which
drops to six weeks if you keep the
wireless features turned on.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

The screen is touch sensitive;
you swipe to turn from one page
to the next, and pinch or unpinch,
as you would on the iPad, to
zoom in and out. As well as the
regular British and American
English dictionaries, it has built-in
translation dictionaries.
Price 89
Link www.sony.co.uk/reader
Kobo readers
Kobo makes an enormous range
of e-readers, from the diminutive
Mini, with its pocket-friendly 5in
screen, to the more conventional
Kobo Touch and backlit Kobo Glo.
All are tied into the Kobo
store, which oers a choice of
around 3 million books, magazines
and newspapers, which you can
buy direct from the device. Every
reader has a built-in dictionary,
and lets you choose from a range
of font faces and sizes to customise
your reading experience. New
models now include integration
with the Pocket online web
page-saving service.
Kobo has done a deal
with WHSmith to sell its
devices on the high street,

so UK buyers can try them out

before committing their cash.
Price From 39
Link www.kobo.com
Nook Simple Touch and
Simple Touch GlowLight
The Simple Touch has a 6in e-inkbased touchscreen, like the Kobo
Touch and Kindle Paperwhite.
It has a built-in dictionary and a
choice of fonts in a range of sizes.
The battery lasts for over
two months on a single charge,
and the Nook store has over

2.5 million ebooks, magazines

and newspapers to download.
Theyre downloaded using the
built-in Wi-Fi, and personalised
recommendations appear on the
homescreen to help you choose
your next book.
The GlowLight builds on the
features of the Simple Touch by
adding a light behind the screen
that lets you read in the dark the
way you would on an LCD. Both
are very tempting bargains.
Price 29/49
Link nook.co.uk

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Registering your new Kindle

f you buy your Kindle directly

from Amazon, it will already
be set up, registered to your
account and ready for use.
If you bought it from a
supermarket, electrical store or
other high-street shop, however,
it wont have any of your details to
hand and youll have to add them
yourself by stepping through the
easy registration process.
Registering your Kindle isnt
simply a means of giving your
data to Amazon so that it can send
you oers and emails, as you may
consider to be the case when you
register software or an electrical
appliance. Instead, registration is
an essential part of setting up your
device and getting it ready to use.
It ties it to your Amazon account
so that all of your payment details
and gift vouchers will be available
to use when you purchase books
directly through the device.
The Kindle uses Amazons
one-click purchase system,
whereby clicking the Buy Now
button on a books listing page
immediately buys and downloads
the title (although if you bought it
by accident, so long as you havent
started reading it you can easily
cancel the download, remove the
book from your device and receive
a refund). You wont be asked to

Walkthrough
Skill level

Beginner a simple task that everyone

can complete

Time required

Around ve minutes

Equipment

Kindle, Kindle Touch, Kindle Keyboard or

Kindle Fire, plus Mac or PC with an active
network connection and internet browser

conrm your purchase at each

stage, so save yourself the hassle
of revoking a purchase by reading
each book description carefully
in advance.
Registering the regular Kindle
To facilitate registration, every
Kindle is assigned a unique serial
number (see below). Press the

menu button and select Settings

and youll nd yours at the bottom
of the screen (press Settings | More
| Device to nd it on Kindle Fire).
If you have a Kindle Keyboard,
which Amazon no longer sells,
but you can source on auction
sites like eBay, you can nd the
serial number by holding Shift and
Alt and pressing full stop, or by
looking at the bottom of the menus.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

The shortcut pulls up a blank
screen with two barcodes and
your unique serial number. Keep
this secret and dont share it with
friends, but make a note of it for
use in the next step.
Now log into your Amazon
account using a regular browser
and click Kindle | Manage Your
Kindle | Register a Kindle (youll
nd the last link in the left-hand
menu box) to start the process
of tying your new Kindle to your
existing Amazon account.
Type the serial number you
noted from your Kindle menus
into the Serial Number box and
click Register. This ties your
Kindle to your account and
authorises it to make purchases
using your credit card.
Registering the Kindle Paperwhite
The Paperwhite takes advantage of
the fact that you can interact more
easily with the Kindle screen.
When you rst start up
your device, youll be asked to
connect to a wireless network.
Do this by choosing the network
for which you have access rights
with the strongest signal and, if
appropriate, enter your network
password to get online.
Your Kindle Paperwhite will
then ask you to enter the email
address and password of your
Amazon account (see right). Doing
this associates the device with
your account, and your existing
purchases will be made available
to you on the cloud through the
Paperwhite homescreen.

Registering in this way not

only lets you buy books, but also
send documents to your Kindle
over email, and send books from
Amazons site using a browser.

If you sell your Kindle,

deregister it before passing it on
by following the instructions on
p26, to stop the next owner buying
content on your account.

WHY REGISTER?
Registration is an essential step, whichever Kindle youve bought.
Its not simply a means for Amazon to gather customer information
from anyone who bought their Kindle through another store its the
process by which the device is tied to your account so that purchases
you make online are sent to your reader for consumption, and those
you make through the Kindle are billed accurately.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Keeping your Kindle

password protected

obody wants to lose their

Kindle; worse still to have
it stolen. Neither of these
is a pleasant scenario to consider,
but its a sad truth of life that no
matter how careful you are with
your possessions theres always a
chance they can go astray.
Fortunately, Amazon makes
it relatively easy to protect your
Kindle and its contents so that
even if you dont manage to
recover it you can keep prying
eyes away from any private and
personal documents youve
synced to it. Further, if youve
been reading particularly personal
books, like self-help or medical
manuals, nobody else will know
unless they gain access to your
online account. This could be
an important consideration
for parents who may feel that
their children shouldnt be
reading the books theyve bought
for themselves.
Protecting your Kindle is done
by applying a password, which can
be as simple or as complex as you
like (wed recommend the latter).
When in place, it will prevent
anyone from reading your books
and any personal documents
youve sent to the device and,
more importantly, stop them from

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

buying anything on your account.
With any luck, so long as you
dont choose a very obvious
password, it should delay them for
long enough to give you a chance
to change the password on your
Amazon account and deregister
the Kindle remotely.
Obviously, the usual rules
of choosing a password apply,
as weve outlined in step 3,
below, and if at all possible you
should consider using a mix of
letters, digits and non-standard
characters such as foreign letter
forms and accented letters that

Walkthrough
Skill level

Beginner a simple task that everyone

can complete

Time required

Around ve minutes

Equipment

Kindle, Paperwhite, Kindle Keyboard or

Kindle Touch

you can access through the

extended onscreen keyboards on
all Kindle models. Avoid using
words that would appear in a
dictionary, and if you have trouble
remembering random strings of

characters then use an acronym

spelling out a meaningful phrase.
Theres still no way to locate a
lost Kindle remotely, so you might
never get it back, so keep a close
eye on it, even if it is protected.

Setting a password

Tap the menu button and

select Settings. Press the page
forward button on the regular
Kindle to advance to the next
screen. Move down to Device
Password and select this
option. On the Paperwhite,
tap Device Options followed
by Device Passcode.

On the regular Kindle, enter

a password that youll nd
easy to remember but anyone
else would be hard pushed
to guess. You should try
to use a mixture of letters
and symbols or numbers
here and avoid common
combinations like QWERTY,
12345 or password. On the
Paperwhite, enter a passcode
(you can only use digits),
repeat it to check that youve
got it right, and then tap OK
to save the code.

The next time you switch on

your Kindle and every time
thereafter until you deactivate
the password youll be
asked to enter it before you
can do anything. If youve
forgotten what your password

is, press the down button on

the regular Kindle. This will
reveal your hint, as well as
the contact numbers youll
need to phone to get Amazon
to reset the device if youve
forgotten the password.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Removing a Kindle from

your Amazon account
1

hould you lose a Kindle, the

rst thing you should do
is remove it from your
account. You should do exactly
the same if you decide to sell it
on. Why? Because deregistering
removes it from your account and
stops the person you sold it to or
someone who may have stolen or
found it on the bus from buying
books using your payment details.
It also stops any documents you
might have set up to be emailed
to your device from reaching
their destination. Its easiest to
do this using a regular browser,
which is obviously the only way
you can do it if the device has
been stolen.
(1) Log into Amazon as usual and
click the Your Account link above
the search bar, then pick Manage
Your Kindle from the menu.

(2) Click Manage Your Devices in

the sidebar to open a list of all the
Kindle devices that you own and
have previously registered to your
account, along with any Kindle
reader applications installed on
smartphones, tablets, Macs or PCs
and any pre-ordered Kindles that
havent yet arrived.

Reading
with your
Kindle

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Buying books directly

using your Kindle

mazons dedicated Kindle

Store is built right into
each Kindle device, with
an option on the plain Kindles
main menu taking you to the
store to search for books, and
a shopping cart icon on the
Paperwhites homescreen doing
the same. Although you cant
buy Kindle versions of every
book published, the catalogue
of available titles is extensive
and impressive, and there are
several hundred volumes that are
available only on the Kindle and
not in print. To make it easier
to shop through your device,
Amazon doesnt include any print
publications in the version of the
store built into the Kindle. If you
want to browse them, youll have
to use a regular computer, or the
Kindles integrated web browser.
Many Kindle books are
cheaper than their regular
paper-based editions, on account
of the fact that producing them
is cheaper and the publishers
dont also have to pay for them
to be shipped around the world.
That means that by building up a
digital, rather than paper library,
you can make a decent saving. Do
shop carefully, though, as this isnt
always the case and, particularly if

youre happy to buy second hand,

you can sometimes nd physical
formats of the same titles at
lower prices.
Here well walk you through
the process of buying a book
directly from your Kindle without
the use of a computer as an
interim platform. Over the pages
that follow, well show you how
to do the same without a wireless
connection, and how to send
books directly from the Amazon
store through a regular web
browser. Whichever method you
use, you really can be reading
books in 60 seconds, just as
Amazon promises.

Walkthrough
Skill level
Beginner a simple task that
everyone can complete
Time required
Around ve minutes
Equipment
Any e-ink- or LCD-based
Kindle, including Kindle Fire
and previous-generation
devices

furniture, but you can still

access recommendations and
bestseller lists.
Use the search box at
the bottom (Kindle) or top
(Paperwhite) of the screen to
enter the title of your book,
the name of a chosen author
or keywords relating to the
subject you want to read
about. Press the centre button
to perform the search, and
after a moments hesitation
Kindle returns a list of results.

Buying books on your Kindle

Make sure your Kindle is

connected to your network by
switching on Wi-Fi or using
3G. Press the menu button
and select Shop in Kindle
Store on the regular Kindle,
or tap the shopping cart icon
on the Paperwhite to visit
Amazons dedicated Kindle
book store. This has been
reformatted for use on the
Kindle rather than a regular
browser so you wont see
any of the surrounding page

When youve found the book

you were looking for, tap its
cover on the Paperwhite or
click on the link beside its
name on the regular Kindle
to open a short description

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Regular Kindle

Kindle Paperwhite

Regular Kindle

Kindle Paperwhite

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

and more details about price,
rating, reviews and so on. You
can either buy it directly or
download the rst few pages
for free so that you can read it
to make sure youre going to
enjoy the whole thing. Do the
latter by moving the selector
on the Kindle to the Try a
Sample line and pressing the
centre button, or by tapping
that link on the Kindle
Paperwhite. The sample will
download at no charge.

Youll be able to read around

5% of the book in this free
sample. When you get to the
end of the excerpt, you can
download the rest of it. Do
this on the Kindle by moving
the pointer to the Buy Now
link at the end of the sample
le and clicking the centre
button or, on the Paperwhite,
by tapping the top of the
reading screen to call up the
menu and then tapping Buy
This Book Now.

When the download

completes, your book will
be added to the top of your
homescreen. The sample
will remain on your device,
so if you want to be tidy and
remove it, move the underline
up to its entry on the regular
Kindle, press right on the
four-way controller and select
Delete, or on the Paperwhite,
hold down on the cover until
the menu pops up and select
Delete This Sample.

Regular Kindle

Kindle Paperwhite

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Buying books through your PC

or Mac browser
Walkthrough

ood though the Kindles

built-in Store access is,
its not always the most
convenient route through which
to buy digital books. If youd
prefer a more leisurely shopping
experience and you have access to
a regular computer with an active
internet connection you might
instead want to do your shopping
through a full browser and send
your books to your Kindle over
the air from there. Here well
show you how to do just that in
four simple steps.

Skill level

Beginner a simple task that everyone

can complete

Time required

Around ve minutes

Equipment

Any Kindle, including previous versions, or

a PC or Mac with an internet connection

Step by step
1.

Open your browser and visit

the local Amazon store for
your country. Use the links
on the left of the homepage
to visit the Kindle Store,
selecting Kindle eBooks from
the y-out menu. Click in the
search box at the top of the
page and enter the title of the
book you want to read, the
name of a favourite author or
keywords that describe the
subject youre looking for.
Select the book you want from
the list of results to call up a
full description, an image of

its cover and any reviews left

behind by previous readers.
3.

Use the drop-down menu

on the right of the screen to
select the device to which you
want to send the book. This
list includes not only regular
Kindle hardware devices, but
also Kindle applications that
youve installed on mobile

devices such as the iPhone

or iPad, and the reader
applications for use on PCs
and Macs.
4.

Open the Kindle menu and

select Sync & Check for Items
to download the book you sent
from your browser. You can
also send samples by using
the Try it free drop-down.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

KINDLE CONFUSION
If you have several Kindles and
cant work out from the list of
available devices which is the
one to which you want to send
your new book, return to the

account management pages and

rename your primary e-reader to
something more memorable so
that you can always send it to the
right one rst time when buying

through the browser. Dont worry

if you get it wrong, though, as you
can download a book sent to one
device on any other Kindle logged
into the same account.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Transferring books to your

Kindle using USB
Walkthrough

ver the next few pages,

well be exploring
alternatives to the
regular Kindle Store. Not only
does expanding the number of
shops from which you buy content
increase your choice of books,
but it means you can often nd
books for free that arent stocked
on the Kindle Store. If youve
downloaded books through your
browser rather than through
Amazons own store, youll need
to transfer them to your Kindle
manually by connecting it to
your PC or Mac and dragging
them across.

Skill level

Beginner a simple task that everyone

can complete

Time required

Around ve minutes

Equipment

Any Kindle, including previous versions,

and a PC or Mac with a vacant USB port,
plus bundled Kindle USB cable

USB devices you own to see

whether their connectors are
compatible, but never force
one that doesnt t easily.

a Finder or Windows Explorer

window, click the Kindle and
open the documents folder.
3.

Your Kindle will appear on

either your PC or Mac as
though it was an external hard
drive, with the name Kindle.
Here were using a Mac. Open

Drag your downloaded Kindle

or Mobipocket format book
into the folder to send it
to your device. It now
appears at the top of your
homescreen.

Step by step
1.

Start by connecting your

Kindle to your PC or Mac.
Ideally, you should connect it
to a powered port physically
attached to your computer,
unless an additional external
hub connected to your
computer has its own power
supply. If youve lost the cable
that came with your Kindle
and need to buy a new one,
search Amazon using the term
usb cable for kindle to view
authorised replacements.
However, it uses a standard
plug, so also check any other

QUICK TIP
Properly disconnect your Kindle
from your PC or Mac before
unplugging it from the USB port
so that you can avoid ending up
with corrupt, incomplete les and
books that you cant open.
In Windows, eject by
right-clicking the USB devices
in the System Tray, then rightclicking the Kindle and selecting
Eject. On a Mac, locate the Kindle
in the Finder sidebar and click the
eject icon, indicated left.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

KINDLE-COMPATIBLE FILE FORMATS
Transferring books over USB
means you can download your
reading material from sources
other than Amazons ocial
online Kindle store. Free book

repositories like Gutenberg oer

a wide range of classics in Kindle
format (see Alternative bookstores,
overleaf). Be sure to always
download KF8 or Mobipocket-

format books if you want to read

them on your Kindle, as even
though you can transfer ePub
books to your Kindle you wont be
able to open them.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Alternative bookstores

lthough Amazons own

store is certainly the most
convenient place to shop,
on account of being intimately
tied to the Kindle itself and even
appearing in the Kindle menus,
there are plenty of alternative
sources well worth checking out.
By shopping around you
can often make savings, as it
means you can download cheaper
versions of the same books, and in
some cases enjoy a wider choice,
as Amazons extensive catalogue
certainly doesnt include every
book converted for Kindle reading.
Here well prole the best
places to buy and nd out about
books outside of Amazons walled
garden. If you want to go hunting
for further options then make
sure the books you download
are either dedicated Kindle
les or Mobipocket-formatted
books. Amazons own format is a
variation on Mobipocket.

Sadly, the widely used ePub

format, which was adopted by
Apple as the basis of its own iBook
Store, Sony for its Reader Store
and Kobo for its own online shop,
isnt compatible with the Kindle,
despite hints over the years that
previous updates to Amazons
e-readers would, indeed, read and
render the format.
Dont be tempted to copy
paid-for books from friends and
family. Not only is this unfair on
the authors who in many cases
have spent years working on their
tomes (and its illegal), but theres
a good chance youll nd that the
books wont work on your device.
Most books downloaded
from Amazon and other online
bookstores include digital rights
management (DRM) code that ties
them to the account of the person
who bought them. If that isnt you,
they wont work on your Kindle,
wasting you both time and space.

Left: Open any books dedicated

page from the Gutenberg results
for a choice of formats. Choose
Kindle if available, and plain text or
Mobipocket if not, to download a
version thats compatible with
your device.

Project Gutenberg

www.gutenberg.org
Gutenberg is the king of all
alternative online book resources.
At the time of writing, it contains
over 42,000 books in a wide
range of formats in languages as
diverse as Esperanto, Breton and
Occitan. All of them have one
thing in common: theyre out of
copyright in the US, so as long as
youre not infringing any copyright
regulations in your own country
youre free to download them.
Project Gutenberg was
established by Michael S Hart
on 4 July 1971. Appropriately
enough, considering the date,
the rst work he entered into the
projects now vast collection, was
the Declaration of Independence.
At the time, he wanted the
complete catalogue to eventually
hold at least 10,000 of the most
commonly consulted books so
that they could be accessed and
used by anyone for free (although
donations are always welcome).
It was a noble cause that, over
the years, has received signicant
donations and now far exceeds
its original stated aims, with an
average of 50 new books being
added to the database every week.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

The most commonly published

language on the site is English,
followed in turn by French,
German and Finnish.
Project Gutenberg has a
comprehensive search tool,
allowing you to interrogate the
catalogue in a similar manner to
Amazon itself, and it maintains
a list of newly added content
and most popular downloads if
you need a quick x. This is the
best place to look if youre after
literature and classics, as titles like
Ulysses, Jane Eyre and Pride and
Prejudice are habitual inhabitants
of the list.

To download a book, click its

title to open its dedicated record
and then choose the format
youre after. The simplest of all
formats is plain text, which is fully
compatible with the Kindle, but
for the best experience you should
choose the Kindle (no images)
format if its oered. Avoid
choosing ePub, as this wont work
on the Kindle its intended for
alternative hardware readers, and
many e-reader apps installed on
tablets and smartphones.
Click the appropriate format
and if its one that your browser
cant render within its own

window it will be downloaded to

your computer (you cant send
them directly to your Kindle). If
you nd that the le opens directly
then its one that your browser
is able to read (this is commonly
the case with plain text les). In
this instance, either hold Shift
while clicking to save it to your
hard drive in a default location,
or right-click the link and select
the option to save it if you want to
also be able to choose the location
where its stored.
Youll nd that the quality
of the books varies, although
in general theyre all very

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

well produced and, due to the
large number of distributed
proofreaders helping out around
the world, are generally accurate
copies of the original work.
Theyre fully compatible with
the Kindles various options for
changing font faces and text size,
although obviously you cant
remove elements like double
spaces (see below) that shouldnt
be there.

Note that as is the case

with many of the books you can
download from these alternative
outlets, the Gutenberg les wont
include the embedded page
numbers that you can nd in some
Kindle les downloaded from
Amazon, so although this is a great
way to join in with a reading group
for free you may nd it dicult to
discuss the classics if the group is
using specic page references.

JOHANNES
GUTENBERG

Gutenberg, after whom

the project is named, is
famed for having invented
the modern printing press.
Living in Mainz in the early
15th century, his innovation
was so-called movable type,
which allowed the various
parts of a page the letters,
numbers and so on to be
moved around and re-used
between jobs. The biggest
and most famous book
printed this way was the
Gutenberg Bible, of which 21
copies survive.
Image: Wikipedia

Left: All books are added to the Project

Gutenberg catalogue by volunteers
and, although quality is generally very
good, stylistic points will vary between
the dierent titles on oer.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Open Library

www.openlibrary.org
The goal of Open Library is to
produce a single web page for
every book ever published. By its
own admission, this adds
up to hundreds of millions of
book records.
Each books record includes
a short review, a picture of the
cover and details of each edition
published both digital and
physical. These are linked directly
to the shops through which you
can buy them including Alibris,
Amazon, AbeBooks and Book
Depository. For our needs,
Amazon is naturally of greatest
interest.
So why would you choose
to nd books this way rather
than buy them directly through
Amazon? Because its the easiest
way to nd out more about your
book before you set out to read
it. On Amazon, you can read
the publishers blurb and, often,
reader reviews. Through Open
Library, on the other hand,
youll also nd excerpts from
Wikipedia, information about the
dierent imprints and reprints,
and comment from such notable
experts as Margaret Atwood, as

Feedbooks
www.feedbooks.com
Although Feedbooks commercial
titles arent compatible with the
hardware Kindle readers or their
equivalent apps and software
installations, its public domain
books will work on them. Many
of these titles are the same as the
books you can nd on Project
Gutenberg, but the process of
searching and downloading
through Feedbooks (see left) is
much more pleasant thanks to a
well-thought-out interface. It may
well be the most successful store
youve never heard of, distributing
3,000,000 books a month.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

DOWNLOADING
FROM MANYBOOKS

ManyBooks
www.manybooks.net
ManyBooks claims to oer the
best ebooks at the best price: free.
Its library currently comprises
29,000 titles.
Almost more impressive than
the list of books on oer is the
range of formats in which they
can be downloaded. As well as
Kindle AZW and the compatible
Mobipocket (MOBI and PRC)
formats it has dedicated editions
in PDF and plain text (both of
which work on the Kindle) and
ePub, HTML, RTF, Sony Reader
and more.

More than half a million

people visit ManyBooks every
month, so its also a great outlet
for would-be authors to promote
their work through, as ManyBooks
also publishes original digital
ction. If you know anything
about writing or publishing then
you can earn some money as the
site is looking for contributors
to write on this subject, and is
paying a modest fee to those
who help out and go onto have
their contribution published
on the site.

Turn on your Kindles Wi-Fi

and click Menu | Experimental
| Web browser. Visit
mnybks.net and use the search
box to nd the author or book
you want to download. Click
on the Kindle/Mobipocket
option and conrm that you
want to download the le
(see above).

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

OReilly Media

oreilly.com
OReilly is one of the leading
publishers of technical non-ction
books in the world. Its titles have
long been trusted by those who
work with computers and web
technology as some of the most
reliable texts on a wide variety
of subjects, and its policy where
ebooks are concerned is very
liberal and forward-thinking. For
starters, it doesnt apply digital
rights management measures to
its work, meaning theres nothing
to stop you from reading them on
several of your devices.

It publishes in a wide variety

of formats, which have been
optimised for dierent platforms
(it publishes in Mobipocket format
for Kindle-using customers), and
it also provides free updates for
life, so you know that even if you
buy a book today and it receives
an update tomorrow youll be able
to download the amendments, too,

QUICK TIP
Check out Amazons constantly
updated lists of most popular
books, with seperate categories
for free and paid volumes.
If youre feeling guilty about
not being better read in the
classics, head for the freebies
rst as many of the best-loved
books of all time are now out
of copyright and are free to
download. Not only is it cheaper
than buying physical copies, its
also a greener option.

so that your book stays current

and relevant. At the opposite
end of the scale, early release
versions are unedited books that
the company is still working on,
which are nonetheless available
to buy so that you can get a
heads-up on the latest technology
and receive the edited version for
free when its nished.
Check in at the site frequently
as it runs deals of the day, so if the
book youre after isnt on oer now
theres a chance it could be before
too long.
Below: OReillys ebooks are keenly
priced and can be bought alongside
the print editions.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Listening to audiobooks

s well show you later,

sound-enabled Kindles
can read books aloud,
using the text and its integrated
speech synthesiser to translate the
content into spoken word.
If you have a Kindle Keyboard,
Kindle 1, 2 or 3, or Kindle DX, you
can go one stage further and also
play back original spoken word
books for which you dont own the
text edition, courtesy of downloads
from Audible, a company owned
by Amazon. Audiobooks arent
available on the Paperwhite.
Audible books use a specic
format that makes them far more
exible and versatile than regular
MP3 les. Your Kindle will be able
to remember where you left o
when you were last listening to
one, and you can skip backwards
and forwards to specic points.
With MP3s, all you can do is play
them in the background while
youre reading your book.

KEYBOARD CONTROL
Rather than using the graphical
controls on the bottom of the
Kindle display, Kindle Keyboard
owners can use Alt+F to skip to
the next track, and Alt+Space to
pause and resume playback.

Audible sells audiobooks in

a number of formats, with 2 and
3, which are compatible with the
rst-generation Kindle, equivalent
to AM and FM radio, respectively.
Format 4, which is compatible
with the rst-, second- and
third-generation Kindles, plus the
Kindle DX, is roughly equivalent to
an average MP3. Audible Enhanced
Audio-formatted les have sound
quality equivalent to a CD and are
compatible only with the Kindle
DX and second-generation
devices and any compatible models
that followed.

Transferring content
Compatible Kindles have an
audible folder ready for you to
drop in your content (if yours
doesnt and its listed above,
you can create it by plugging the
Kindle into your Mac or PC and
using the Finder or Explorer).
You can only play back
Audible les with the AA or AAC
extension. Dropping in any others
will have no eect.
Audiobooks are sold through
Audibles site at www.audible.
com and www.audible.co.uk.

Below: Kindle Keyboard users, and anyone with an older Kindle device, can buy
audiobooks from Audible and play them back using their devices integrated
player. Audible is an Amazon company, so its not surprising that you can link your
Amazon and Audible accounts.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Left: Audible les are encoded in a
way that makes them more exible
than MP3s. Many Kindles can use this
encoding to oer a full set of playback
controls.

QUICK TIP
Not all Audible les are shipped
in format 4, so shop carefully. In
particular, pay attention when
buying Audible les through
third-party retailers, which may
not specify the format on oer.

Playing audio les

Having successfully transferred
your content, eject your Kindle and
disconnect it from your computer.
Youll see the new le on the
homescreen, with an audible
tag in the margin to show that its
an audio le and thus distinguish
it from your books or samples.

Open it and use the four-way

controllers centre button to click
the Play button, or use the left
and right controls on the same
controller to move between the
various onscreen buttons of the
transport bar, pressing the central
button when you reach the one you
want to use. The controls should
be familiar to anyone whos used a

software-based media player on a

PC or Mac, with the added benet
of dedicated skip buttons that
move forwards and backwards 30
seconds at a time.
If this is the rst time youve
played an Audible le on your
Kindle, it will ask you to authorise
your device by entering your
Audible username and password.
If you cant remember these,
visit www.audible.com or www.
audible.co.uk, click Sign in and use
the Forgotten your username or
password? link to retrieve them.
Note that your audible password
isnt the same as your Amazon
password or any password youve
set on your Kindle to prevent it
being used when lost or stolen.
Youll only need to authorise
your device once, at which point
it will be set up to decode the
protected downloads, and will be
able to play all of your compatible
previous purchases.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Highlighting text and

posting to social networks

ou cant scribble in the

margins of a digital
book, so Amazon has
implemented a clever system of
notes and highlights that allows
you to perform a similar task using
your Kindles keyboard controls,
whether they be onscreen or
hardware based.
However, its take on
note-making is smarter than a
regular pen and a printed book
could ever be, as these highlights
and favourite sections can also
be shared with your Twitter
followers and Facebook friends
by posting them directly to your
tweet stream or Wall from the
Kindle itself. Theyre also backed
up on Amazons servers, which
means you can nd them all in the
same place and return to them at a
later date.
Highlighting text
A true bookworm enjoys not just
the story, but also the style of the
writing contained within its pages.
Few who fall into this category
can resist the urge to make a note
of their favourite passages so
that they can come back to them
in the future, but without easily
accessible page numbers or the

Above: To highlight favourite passages from a well-loved book, position the cursor
at the start of the passage, press the centre button and then move to the furthest
end of the passage before pressing the button again to save it or, on a Paperwhite,
drag across the text to set the start and end points.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

option of turning down a corner,
you might think that was easier
said than done where Kindle
books were concerned.
Fortunately not. Every
time you come across a notable
passage, use the four-way
controller on the Kindle and
Kindle Keyboard to move to the
start and press the centre button,
or touch the screen on the Kindle
Paperwhite. Now move the cursor
through the text until you get to
the end of the passage and press
the centre button again to save the
highlight or, on the Paperwhite,
drag across the text you want to
save and then select the option to
save the note.

Above: As well as being underlined on the Kindle copy of each book, popular
highlights are displayed on Amazons book listing pages.

Retrieving your jottings

Your highlights and notes are
stored alongside your book
and automatically backed up
on Amazons servers (you can
turn this o through Settings |
Annotations Backup | turn o
on the Kindle, or Menu | Settings
| Reading Options | Notes &
Highlights on the Paperwhite).

You can retrieve them by pressing

Menu while reading any page
of the book and selecting View
Notes & Marks, where theyll be
organised into a table in order.
Popular Highlights
If youve chosen to share your
highlights with other readers,

Amazon will amalgamate them

anonymously, along with everyone
elses and sync them along with
every copy of the book to which
they relate on every device to
which its been downloaded.
These highlights have a feint
dotted underline below them in
the ow of the book, at the start
of which is a note of how many
people have chosen to mark it out
(see left). If you nd this annoying,
turn o the popular highlights
feature by opening Settings,
turning to the second (Kindle
Keyboard) or third page (Kindle/
Paperwhite) and clicking the turn
o link beside Popular Highlights.
Left: To hide Popular Highlights, press
Return while viewing the page on
which they appear. Turn them o
permanently through Settings.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Walkthrough
Just below this youll also nd
the link to turn o Public Notes,
which are those notes written by
people that you follow at kindle.
amazon.com. These dier from
highlights in that highlights are
merely marked-out passages of the
original text, which are displayed
on your device whether you follow
the people who marked them out
or not. Notes, on the other hand,
will only be displayed if they were
made by someone you follow.
Sharing your highlights with
your Twitter followers
Whether its because you want
to prove how well read you are,
or you just want to inspire your
friends to pick up a book youve
enjoyed, Kindle also lets you share
your favourite passages with your
Twitter and Facebook followers
using its built-in tools.
To do this it obviously
requires that you have your login

Skill level

Intermediate generally easy, but requires

some supplementary account details

Time required

Around ve minutes

Equipment

Kindle, Touch, Keyboard, Paperwhite or

Kindle Fire, including previous-generation
devices, plus an account on Twitter

Set up your Kindle to post to Twitter

2.
3.

Open Settings | Social Networks | Manage on yourKindle, or

Settings | Reading Options | Social Networks. Your device activates
its integrated browser at this point and opens a page, so make sure
3G or Wi-Fi are active. Select Twitter as the service you want
to authorise.
Enter your Twitter username and password, and then click Sign in to
authorise the application to post to your account.
Youll be logged into Twitter and then directed back to the setup
screen, which will conrm that the process has completed by
displaying your Twitter username within the Twitter section.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Walkthrough
Skill level

Intermediate generally easy, but requires

some supplementary account details

Time required

Around ve minutes

Equipment

Kindle, Touch, Keyboard, Paperwhite or

Kindle Fire, including previous-generation
devices, plus an account on Facebook

Set up your Kindle to post to Facebook

1. Repeat step 1 from the Twitter walkthrough, this time choosing to
authorise Facebook instead.
2. Use your email address or phone number to log into Facebook,
remembering that the @ symbol is found behind the SYM button on
the Kindle Keyboard and the secondary keyboard on the entry-level
Kindle.
3. In an eort to improve security, Facebook likes to register each
device you use to access its services. Choose a logical name for
your Kindle (weve chosen kindle keyboard, below) and then
conrm that you want it to access your basic information and
data and post to Facebook as though it was you by clicking Allow
on the following screen.

details for each service to hand,

so with Wif-Fi or 3G active on
your device, open Settings and
follow the instructions in the two
walkthroughs to the left.
You can now share content
from your book using either social
network, remembering at all times
to respect any copyright that may
be applicable, such as sharing only
a small part for the purpose of
evaluation or review.
To do this, repeat the process
of highlighting your chosen
passage by clicking at the start and
end of the selected text, and then
hold Alt while pressing Return to
share it to either network.
Your Kindle will ask you
to add a short note, which will
be appended to your highlight.
When youve done this, click the
onscreen Share button.
If Wi-Fi or 3G are turned on (it
will warn you if they arent), it will
post your covering note to either
or both of your social networks,
depending on which youve set up,
along with a link to the highlighted
text, which will be stored on
kindle.amazon.com.
Linking in this way rather than
including it directly allows you to
highlight more than Twitters 140
character limit.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Backing up your Kindle

purchases

eeping a local backup of

your Kindle purchases will
let you re-install them on
your device without downloading
them again from Amazons servers
in the event of a catastrophic crash
of your e-reader.
Step by step
1. Connect your Kindle to your
computer. What happens next
depends on whether youre
using a Mac or PC. On a Mac,
the device appears in the
Finder sidebar; on Windows,
its assigned a drive letter. If
your PC asks you what youd
like to do with the Kindle,

AMAZON DRM

simply choose to open it and it

will be treated like an external
drive.
2. Youll see three folders on your
Kindle: documents, audible
and music. The second and
third of these contain audio
books and MP3s. The rst,
documents, is where the Kindle
saves your downloaded books.
Double-click it to open up its
contents. The les inside this
folder arent particularly well
organised as your books, their
metadata and any text les,
PDFs and screen grabs are all
bundled together. We only
want to back up our books, so
use the Macs toolbar search
box to lter it down to just

Although you can copy books

from your Kindle to local
backups for repopulating your
device without redownloading
all of your books, the DRM
built into each one means you
cant share them with others.

AZW les, or click the dropdown menu on the right-hand

side of the Type column header
in Windows and select AZW as
the displayed le type.
You can now drag these
isolated les to another
location on your computer to
back them up. This will save
only the books themselves.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

If you want to also save your
bookmarks then copy any les
bearing the same name as the
book ending .mbp.
Store them on a hard
drive or ash drive, but dont
be tempted to share them
with friends. Amazon has
implemented a digital rights
management (DRM) system
that will prevent them from
working on any Kindle that
isnt registered to your account.
3. Should you have a problem
with your Kindle that causes
it to lose your books, you can
copy them back over USB.
However, to read them on
an alternative device or an
app, youll have to send new
copies to each one. Do this
either by browsing through
archived items on your Kindle
or by logging into Amazon
and selecting Your Account |
Manage your Kindle. This calls
up your past purchases, with
buttons beside each one that
send purchased books to an
alternative device.

Walkthrough
Skill level

Intermediate requires some familiarity

with Windows or the Mac

Time required

Around ten minutes

Equipment

Any Kindle plus a Mac or PC and the

bundled Kindle USB cable

4. You can also transfer books

by USB, which allows you to
save money by buying a Wi-Fi
Kindle even if you dont have
a wireless network. To do this,
select Transfer by Computer
when buying a book and again
select the destination device.
It will be downloaded to your
computer with the necessary
DRM permissions in place for
it to work once transferred by
USB to your Kindle.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Reading Kindle books

without using your Kindle

mazon no doubt turns

a tidy prot from the
Kindle, but the real
money is in books. For every
Kindle it sells, it will have to take
o the cost of research, design,
production and shipping it out to
customers around the world.
With an ebook, though, its
takings are almost all prot, which
is why Amazon can aord to pay
its publishers such a generous
share of the royalties. All it needs
to do is host the book le on its
cloud servers and deliver it to the
reader when they request a copy.
The rst time they do, the cost
of delivery is deducted from the
publishers share of the takings.
Its no wonder, then, that
Amazon has sought to push its
Kindle technology onto as many
platforms as possible, with native
applications for the iPad and
iPhone, Android, Macs and PCs.
Unfortunately for Amazon,
Apple changed the rules on in-app
purchases for all applications
hosted on the iPhone or iPad,
dictating that all such purchases
should be handled by its own
payment processing mechanism,
with cards linked to its own
online store used as the payment
mechanism.

Clearly, this was unacceptable

to Amazon for two reasons. First,
it meant that it lost its direct
relationship with its customers,
so would nd it more dicult
to make recommendations to
each of us about which books we
might enjoy in the future on the
basis of what weve bought in the
past. Second, the 30% that Apple
was demanding in exchange for
processing the purchase was
exactly the same as the amount
that Amazon took from the sale of
each book from publishers.
Below: Native apps let you read Kindle
purchases on a Mac or PC.

Apple gave its app developers

a fair amount of notice that
it intended to implement this
process, and that applications
which didnt comply could no
longer be sold through its online
store. So, Amazon developed new
apps for Apples mobile devices,
without the Kindle Store built in,
submitted them for approval
and at the same time built a
browser-based reader, now hosted
at read.amazon.com.
This boasts many of the
same features as the dedicated
applications, and of course has
a link to the Kindle section of
Amazons online store.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

DOWNLOAD LINKS
Download your reader
application from the following
sites:
Android phone
play.google.com/store/apps/
details?id=com.amazon.kindle
Blackberry
www.amazon.com/kindlebb
Above: The web-hosted Kindle reader gives you access to your complete library
from anywhere in the world where you can get to a web connection.
Above right: The Kindle iPhone app omits the direct buying feature.
The browser reader obviously
also works on regular desktop and
laptop computers, but if you prefer
to use a native application then
check the box of links (see right)
and download the Kindle apps for
Windows and Mac users.

Unfortunately, Amazon
doesnt provide a Linux version
of its Kindle software, despite
the hardware Kindle devices
running Linux as their underlying
operating systems. Linux users
should therefore use Wine.

iPad and iPhone (universal app)

bit.ly/dY9Ooo
Microsoft Windows
www.amazon.com/gp/kindle/pc
Mac OS X
www.amazon.com/gp/kindle/
mac (or from the Mac App
Store at bit.ly/sdSdab)

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Organising books on an
e-ink Kindle

ven the most basic Kindle

can hold 1,400 books at
a time. Thats a whole
lifetimes worth of reading for
most people. To carry the same
number of regular books would
be impossible without the help
of some kind of transport, and it
means that no matter how long
your holiday might be you can
take enough reading material to
see you through until home time.
This is a boon for avid readers,
but it can make nding each
book somewhat tricky, unless you
organise them into collections.
Collections are virtual folders
into which you can organise your
Kindle content, and you can have
several set up on your device
simultaneously to handle dierent
document types.
So, you might want to create
one for documents youve emailed
to your Kindle, one for books you
want to read, another for books
youve already read so that they

dont clutter up the homescreen,

a fourth for downloaded samples,
and so on.
Adding to collections on the Kindle
To add a book to a collection,
return to the homescreen and use
the four-way controller to move
down to the book you want to tidy
away. Now press the right edge of
the controller to call up the book
options. The rst of these is Add
to Collection... Press the centre
button to select it.
Weve already created one
collection on our Kindle (see
below), called Read, which well
use to le books that weve nished
reading. At present, as you can see
from the image, it contains two
books, as indicated by the number
in brackets after its name. Its
already selected, so we only need
press the centre button again to
le our new book into this folder
alongside its existing residents.

If youd rather put your book

in a dierent folder that youve
already created, step down to it
using the bottom button on the
four-way controller. If you want to
start a new collection, step down
to Create New Collection, press
the centre button and give your
new folder a name. When you
conrm the name, the currently
selected book will be automatically
dropped inside it.
Adding to collections on the
Paperwhite
Hold down on the cover of the
book until the menu pops up.
Select Add to Collection and then
select an existing collection by
tapping the check box beside
its name.
If you dont have any
collections set up yet, tap the
menu icon on the top bar and
select Create New Collection. Give
the new collection a name and

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

your selected book will be added

automatically.
Using folders to organise
the homescreen
By default, your Kindle lists all of
your books in order of use, with
the most recently opened volume
listed at the top (Kindle) or left
(Paperwhite) of the homescreen.
This makes it easy to return to
a book at the start of your next
reading session.
1. In this state, it displays all your
led documents and books on
the homescreen as well as inside

their constituent collections (1).

Thats ne if you want to see
everything at once, but it rather
misses out on one major benet of
using folders, which is the ability
to view books and documents
that match a particular criteria in
isolation from their siblings.
To change this, move the
selection line up to the top of the
screen on the Kindle and press
right on the four-way controller,
and change Most Recent First to
Collections. On the Paperwhite, tap
Recent and select Collections (2).
Your homescreen will now
be reorganised, with the books

youve led in your collections

(books weve nished reading in
this case) hidden away inside your
collections, making those you still
have to open easier to nd without
all the clutter (3). It helps you
keep an eye on your outstanding
library items.
To remove even more
clutter, you can go onto hide the
recommended books that appear
at the bottom of the Paperwhites
homescreen. Tap the menu button
and select Settings | Device
Options | Personalise Your Kindle
and tap the ON/OFF slider beside
Recommended Content.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Vocabulary Builder on
Kindle Paperwhite

ts not much more expensive,

but the Kindle Paperwhite
represents a signicant
advance over the plain, old
entry-level Kindle and gives you
more reasons to keep it connected
to the internet at all times.
One of these is the Vocabulary
Builder, which helps when it
comes to learning new words and
phrases and understanding how
theyre used.
The Kindles long had a builtin dictionary, and that remains
the case in the Paperwhite.
Holding down on a word calls up
a denition in a oating panel,
Below: Vocabulary Builder appears on
the Paperwhites homescreen. Tap it to
view your dened words.

and at the same time adds it to

your Vocabulary Builder. This is
a specialised book that appears
on the Paperwhites homescreen.
When opened, it displays a list of
all of the words youve looked up
during your time spent reading.
You should review your
Vocabulary Builder list regularly.
Tap each candidate word to open
its denition in the integrated
dictionary, and use the tabs at

the top of the dialogue to switch

between that and how it was used
within the book from which you
copied it, so that you can see how
it appears in context.
But since its a fully edged
learning tool, Vocabulary
Builder goes further than simply
displaying your words: it helps you
memorise them, too.
If you feel condent that you
know the word and how you could

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

CHANGE DEFAULT DICTIONARY AND LANGUAGE

employ it in your own writing,

tap Mastered at the bottom of the
dialogue. If you think youll need
a bit more work, leave it in place
and tap outside of the dialogue
to switch back to the Vocabulary
Builder overview page.
From here, you can open
your saved words as ashcards by
tapping that option at the bottom
of the display. This lets you step
through them one at a time
using the left and right onscreen
arrows, again switching between
denitions and context
as appropriate.
Of course, if you add a word
to the Vocabulary Builder by
mistake, perhaps because you
held down on a word in a book
for a little too long, you can delete
it from the list by tapping it to
display its denition and then
tapping Delete at the bottom of
the dialogue.
You can also disable the
Vocabulary Builder altogether
through the general Kindle
Paperwhite menus.
Tap the menu button at
the top of the screen and select
Settings | Reading Options
and tap the slider beside
Vocabulary Builder so that its
set to OFF.

Working with the Vocabulary

Builder obviously requires that
your Paperwhite knows which
language you prefer to use. This
will be established when you rst
set up your device, but you can
change it whenever you want at a
later point.
Open the main menu and
tap Settings | Device Options
| Language and Dictionaries |
Dictionaries. Select the dictionary
you want from the list of available
options (see below, left).
Note that the range from
which you can choose depends
on the overall language setting
applied to your Paperwhite.
So, if youve set it to work with
English menus and interface
options, youll only be able
to choose from the Oxford
Dictionary of English (best for
UK users) and the New Oxford
American Dictionary (best for
US users).

You can change the interface

language of your Kindle whenever
you want by opening Settings
| Device Options | Language
and Dictionaries | Language
(remember the positions of
these options if you ever need
to change the language setting
back and cant work out from the
onscreen prompts what each
one means).
The Paperwhite has 11
interface languages built in
(see below, right), with subtle
dierences between similar
language pairs, such as French
and French Canadian, Spanish
and Mexican Spanish, and English
for the United Kingdom and
United States.
Unfortunately, its not possible
to install further languages, as
these are set in the Paperwhites
rmware, so additional
options can only be installed
by Amazon itself.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Exploring books with

Kindle X-Ray

-Ray-enabled books have

been encoded in such a
way that the underlying
structure of the story or
non-ction text has been
fully indexed, allowing you to
cross-reference from one part
of the book to another.
Not all books are compatible
with the X-Ray system, but for
any that are Amazon includes an
X-Ray-enabled line on the listing
on the books catalogue pages.
Tapping a page of an X-Raycompatible book pulls up the
regular menu at the top of the
screen. Here, tap X-Ray to open
the index.
From here, you can work with
the current page, chapter or book,
with key terms and people pulled
out on each one, and bar graphs
showing where they appear within
each block of text. As we can see
from the grab (see right), Apple
and Steve Jobs appear frequently
in the book were currently
reading, but Hawaii and Microsoft
appear less frequently. Further,
mentions of high school
appear more frequently at the
start of the book than they do
towards the middle. Thats not
surprising given that this book is
a biography.

Tapping on any one of these

entries opens up an overlaid panel
with excerpts from every instance
of that term, phrase or person in
the book, allowing us to scroll up
and down through them and tap
to follow a link to the complete
excerpt in its original context.
If youre reading a book with
a particularly extensive character
list, this feature can be a real
boon, as it will help you to keep
track of whos who and what
they do within the book without

highlighting passages and saving

notes on each one.
Its also of particular use
to academic readers, who can
cross-reference one part of a book
with another and skip directly
to the relevant section for their
current thesis or research work.
X-Ray is an Amazon-unique
feature, which the company is also
rolling out to other media types,
such as movies on the Kindle Fire,
to give you more actor, music and
production information.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Improved reference tools

on Kindle Paperwhite

s well as Vocabulary
Builder, the Paperwhite
now has an improved set
of reference tools. Dragging your
nger across a word or selection
lets you look it up in Wikipedia
for a fuller denition than the
built-in dictionary might be able
to provide.
Naturally, this requires that
youre connected to the internet,
so youll need to keep the Kindles
Wi-Fi connection active (if its
switched o, tap the menu icon

and select Settings, then tap the

ON/OFF slider before Aeroplane
Mode to set it to ON.
Selecting a single word
automatically opens the denition
in the dictionary, so tap the
Wikipedia tab to look it up in the
online encyclopedia. Selecting
a phrase calls up a menu; from
this, select More, followed by
Wikipedia. In either case, scroll
down to the bottom of the entry
and tap Open Wikipedia for the
full reference in the browser.

Translations
Being a multilingual device also
means that the Kindle Paperwhite
can cross-reference between
dierent languages.
Highlighting a phrase or
word now gives you the option to
translate it. Naturally, this will be
of most use when youre reading
a foreign-language book and want
to translate a small part into your
native language so that you can
understand it, but you can also
perform the conversion in the
opposite direction.
Drag across the words you
want to translate, tap More in
the menu that appears and select
Translation. Select the source
language in the From menu and
the language to which you want
to convert it in the To menu,
and your Kindle will perform the
translation in the dialogue below.

e
l
d
n
i
K
h a c ks

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Publishing your own

Kindle book

ow that youve got to

grips with downloading
books and reading
them on your Kindle, its time to
consider taking things further.
Thanks to the Kindle and
Amazons organised, integrated,
end-to-end distribution method
that lets readers buy books directly
on their devices, you can now
publish your own material directly
to your audience without following
the usual route of nding an agent
who can represent you to the
Below: Amazons clearly organised
distribution channel links its online
store to your readers Kindles, allowing
you to sell your books to them directly.

publishing industry and negotiate

deals on your behalf. They might
not like it, but at least you have
less red tape to snip.
Clearly, this means that youll
have to do more of the work
yourself, and all of the promotion
of your work, but as the person
who understands what youve
written better than anyone else it
makes sense for you to take on this
role in the rst place. Just prepare
yourself for the fact that it means
you may have less time to get on
with writing the second and third
books in your bestselling saga.
Over the following pages,
well walk you through the steps
involved in putting together your

rst Kindle book and selling it

through Amazons online store.
Learning from the pros
Barry Eisler landed himself
a $500,000 publishing deal.
He knew right away what he
should do: he talked it over
with his family, then turned
it down.
Eisler isnt alone in turning
his back on traditional publishing.
A New York Times bestselling
author, hes set himself up as a
self-publisher, convinced by a
growing body of evidence that
hell earn more that way than any
established imprint could pay him.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

KINDLE CONSIDERATIONS
The e-ink Kindles screen isnt
colour, and neither will it be
any time soon. Speaking to
shareholders in May 2010,
Amazon CEO Je ezos said that
the colour units it had in its labs
werent ready for prime-time
production. For the moment,
then, design two covers for
your book: one colour version
to display on Amazons site,
and a higher contrast, sharper
monochrome edition to embed
within the book. Make the Kindle
edition 960 x 1,280 pixels and it
will exactly t the screen.
You cant lay out your
ebook with the precision of a
printed magazine. Your readers
can choose their own font
face and size, so aim for the
lowest common denominator
to guarantee the broadest
compatibility: owing text in a

single column. Embed images

within the ow of the text rather
than oating them to one side, as
without knowing the dimensions
of the screen in use you cant
accurately predict how theyll
interact with the text.
Complex formatting, such
as the timeline at the start of
each chapter in The Sketchbook
of John, Constable, should be
created as a at graphic. Avoid
trying to match any particular
font. Kindles default font is
Caecilia, of which you can buy a
single cut for as little as 25
(bit.ly/e2Qmmg), but how do
you know your readers havent
switched to the sans-serif or
condensed fonts, and they arent
reading it on a mobile device?
Instead, choose the best font
for the job, regardless of the
surrounding text.

Eisler, like fellow author

Joe Konrath, sees publishers
relevance diminishing in a rapidly
changing industry in the face of
increased digital publication.
Were the writers. We provide
the content that is printed and
distributed, wrote Konrath in
response to Eislers comments.
For hundreds of years, writers
couldnt reach readers without
publishers. We needed them.
Now, suddenly, we dont. But
publishers dont seem to be
taking this Very Important Fact
into account.

The rise of ebooks, the

US sales of which overtook
paperbacks in early 2011, is
putting old-school publishers out
of their jobs and their agents,
and even bricks-and-mortar
bookshops along with them
while e-readers like the Kindle

and iPad are helping even novice

authors to nd an audience and
make real money from writing.
Bypassing the print publishing
cycle should lead not only to lower
prices for the reader thanks to
an increased level of competition
between micro-publishers and a
reduction in their overall costs as
they dont need to invest in paper,
ink and physically shipping books
around the world, but also greater
reader choice. For most people,
their bestselling, groundbreaking
rst novel remains unwritten not
because of the eort involved in
getting the words on the page,
but through lack of faith that
those pages will ever be read.
Imagine what might happen if
publication wasnt a possibility,
but a certainty.
Signing a publishing contract
is certainly something to celebrate,
as it always has been, but its no
guarantee of success. Publishers
make mistakes, just like the rest
of us, pulping the next big thing
when it fails to nd an audience,
and passing up the chance to
publish a blockbuster without ever
seeing its brilliance.
The publishing world is
littered with stories of successful
authors who were turned down
time and time again when they
were just starting out and trying

For hundreds of years, writers couldnt reach

readers without publishers. We needed them.
Now, suddenly, we dont. But publishers dont
seem to be taking this Very Important Fact into
account.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Above: Importing your raw text into

Sigil is the rst step in converting your
document into a properly organised,
sellable Kindle book.

to get overworked, time-short

publishers to show some interest
in their work. J K Rowling and
Stephen King, both household
names with millions of book sales
behind them, went through the
process of sending samples of
their work to leading agents and
publishing houses, only to receive
a rejection slip in return.
Remember, though, that
success comes through actually
selling books, not simply through
having a Penguin embossed on
your cover. So, the more you sell,

the greater your success, but how

do you sell without a publisher?
It isnt easy in print. The biggest
sellers in any bookshop are
stacked on the tables inside the
door. Without a spot on the table,
your chance of success is greatly
diminished, but landing one is
expensive.
Thats where publishers are
of greatest help to the rst-time
author. Bookshops cant aord
to take a risk any more than
a publisher can, so often they
will only stack books on these
tables that have been heavily
promoted in the press and already
proved themselves to be likely
sellers, either because theyve
been written by well-known and
successful names, or because

the publisher has committed a

signicant budget to promoting
the title. Without a publisher, you
wont be able to aord to compete
with them, so the shop-front table
is almost certainly out of your
reach. So, too, are the readers
those tables attract.
There are no tables with
ebooks. Publish on Kindle and
youll be given the same virtual
shelf space as Dan Brown, and
probably earn better royalties.
Most mainstream authors receive
considerably less than 15% of the
cover price for each book sold, but
youll earn up to 70% without any
ongoing costs.
Youll also receive your
payments sooner. Each of your
sales is electronic, so it can be

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

accurately registered right away.
Although readers who buy a
Kindle book by accident can return
it for a refund if they havent
started reading it, the majority
of your sales should progress to
completion. Amazon will record
the royalty against your account
and, a few weeks later, youll
receive a cheque or bank transfer
in exchange for your sales.
Compare that to the world of
traditional publishing. It can easily
take a year or more for a printed
book to nd an agent, several
months for the agent to sell it,
and a year to a year-and-a-half
for your publisher to edit, print
and market it in line with their
leisurely schedules. Your royalties
will likely be paid every six to 12
months, so your chance of earning
anything within three years of
typing The End are very slim,
indeed. Can you aord to wait that
long when you have other books
to write?
Save yourself the frustration,
sidestep the traditional publishing
route as well show you here,
and you can be selling your book
by next weekend. Youll have a
three-year head start on your
print-based rivals in which to start
writing a sequel and beyond.
Formatting your rst book
for Kindle
In the steps that follow, well
be using Sigil to format our
book. Free to download from
code.google.com/p/sigil, its a
cross-platform ebook editor that

BEYOND KINDLE
Amazon is the most accessible
market for rst-time authors, but
its far from the only one. Apples
iBook Store signed up 2,500
publishers in its rst nine months
and sold over 100 million books.
daterstones in the UK sells ebooks
for the Sony Reader, and in the US
Barnes & Noble has its own Nook
device. Beyond these, there are
countless independent outlets
targeting third-party devices.
Unless youve registered with
the US tax system, the easiest way
to sell through each of them is
to use an approved aggregator
such as www.lulu.com. As well
as publishing single-copy print
editions of user-uploaded books,
Lulu will push content into the
iBook Store and other ebook
outlets by assigning your novel a
free ISBN (International Standard
Book Number).

uses ePub as its native format.

They are other platform-specic
options, such as the excellent
Scrivener on the Mac (at the time
of writing Scrivener for Windows
lacks ebook export options), but
the following steps should work on
Macs and PCs.
Here well be working through
the formatting of a genuine
published Kindle book, The
Sketchbook of John, Constable. If
youd like to follow along with a
copy of the nished book in front
of you, download a copy from

This is a stock control code

that uniquely identies every
published book to simplify
the cataloguing and ordering
process. The numbers are
assigned in batches to registered
publishers by national agencies
of the International Standard
Book Numbering Convention.
The UK agency is Nielsen Book
(www.isbn.nielsenbook.co.uk).
To publish books under your
own imprint through Lulu, you
must register with your local
ISBN agency and buy a batch
of numbers. In the UK, it costs
118.68 (inc VAT) for your rst 10
ISBNs. Each subsequent batch of
10 cost 66.36, with discounts
open to more prolic publishers.
Each ISBN can be used only once
and on one format, so you cant
share one between ePub and
Kindle versions.

Amazon UK at amzn.to/gf7fFw
or from the US store at
amzn.to/u475sY.
If your book is a plain text le
then you have a head start, as you
can open it directly inside Sigil.
However, if you wrote it using
Word, youll need to convert it
rst. From Word, pick File |
Save As... and choose Web
Page, Filtered as the format.
Open the result in Sigil (see
opposite page).
Just like web pages, ePub les
are highly structured, with their

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

contents described in underlying
code and arranged in a particular
order, so the e-reader theyre
opened in will know exactly how
to render their contents. Most
e-readers, including the iBooks
software that is free to download
for use on the iPad, iPhone and
iPod touch, use the ePub format
and, although Amazon hinted that
it may also allow this format in
addition to its native book format
in the latest release of its devices,
that never happened. What we
must do, therefore, is create
Kindle-specic books if we
want to sell them through its
online store.
Our rst job is to add the
cover. Position your cursor at the
very start of the text and press
Ctrl+Shift+i (Command+Shift-i
on the Mac) to open the image
browser. Choose the picture you
want to use and it will be added
to the Images folder in the Sigil
sidebar. At the moment, its
nothing more than a oating
asset in your raw ePub le and
wont ever appear in the nished
book until you tell the e-reader
how to use it. We do this using
semantics, which, as the name
suggests, is merely a signpost
describing what the image is and
how it should be used, just as well
later go onto dene dierent
text types.

Right: Import your chosen image and

then use the Add Semantics option on
the formatting y-out menu to mark it
as your cover.

To mark out this image as

the cover, right click its entry in
the sidebar (Command+click
on the Mac) and choose Add
Semantics | Cover Image
(see below).
Images that you want to
embed within the text are
imported in exactly the same way,
but without being marked for use
as the cover. In The Sketchbook
of John, Constable, were using
a graphic timeline at the start
of each chapter that would be
impossible to render accurately
using text. You can see what this
looks like in the image to the right.
Although it looks large, the Kindle
will automatically resize it to t
within the bounds of the screen
when in the nished book.

At this early stage, your

book is a fairly unmanageable
tract just a long stretch of
unformatted text that needs to
be split into chapters. Position
your cursor at the very start
of chapter one, immediately
after the cover image, and press
Ctrl+Return (Command+Return
on the Mac) to insert a chapter
break. Do the same at the start
of chapter two. Youll now have
three les in the sidebars Text
folder with consecutive numbers.
Section0001.xhtml is your cover,
Section0002.xhtml is chapter
one and Section0003.xhtml is
the rest of your book, which still
needs to be further broken down.
Continue working through the
text, inserting a break before each

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

chapter to create new les in the
sidebar until you come to the end
of the text (see right).
If you want to include a table
of contents in your book, use
the style menu on the left of the
toolbar as you create your chapters
to mark each title as a Heading.
There are six heading styles to
choose from, with Heading 1
uppermost in the hierarchy. Press
F7 to open the table of contents
editor and uncheck any headings
that you dont want to include in
the table when you compile your
book (see below).
Your book is progressing
well. Youve split up your text
into chapter sections and given
each one a title so that its easy to
identify on the screen and can be
navigated either by clicking the
headings in the table of contents,

Above: Work your way through your

book, inserting breaks within the text
to denote the start of each chapter.
Each one will appear as a notch on the
Kindle progress bar.
Below: Use the table of contents editor
to uncheck sections you dont want to
appear in the index of your book.

or by using the Kindles four-way

rocker button, clicking left or right
to jump backwards or forwards
through the novel. You now need
to think about how your book is
going to be led and sold online by
adding all of the necessary author
and title data that will identify it.
Do this by pressing F8 to
open the metadata editor and
entering at the very least the title
of your book and the authors
name so that it can be accurately
catalogued by online stores.
To add further details like the
imprint, ISBN, rights and so on,
click More and use the Add Basic
and Add Adv buttons to add
both common and more esoteric
metadata. The more you add, the
more accurately your book will be
catalogued (see overleaf).
When youve nished
formatting your book, save it in
Sigils native ePub format. This is
the format used by the majority of
ebook readers, including iBooks
on the iPad and iPhone, but not
Kindle or Kindle apps, which use
a modied version of Mobipocket.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Right: Add at least a book title and
author, plus whatever other metadata
you feel is appropriate to help identify
your book.

While the Kindle Direct Publishing

process (see Publish and Be
Damned, opposite) will handle the
conversion, for the best and most
predictable results you should
perform the conversion yourself
and test your book locally on your
own Kindle wherever possible.
Well do this using Calibre,
an open source ebook library
tool thats free to download from
calibre-ebook.com. When you
rst install it, youll have to tell
it where to le your library, but
beyond that all management tasks,
including conversions between
dierent book formats, are
conducted through the graphical
user interface.
You can add whole books or
references to them to your Calibre
library in a number of ways, from
the simple step of entering an
ISBN (see Beyond Kindle, p65)
for which it will retrieve the cover
art and metadata, to importing a
complete book le for reading and
manipulation. We need the latter,
so click Add Books and navigate
to your formatted ePub document
(see opposite).
Calibre copies the book to its
library and uses the metadata you
entered in Sigil to catalogue it.
To check that its accurately
imported your book, double-click
its cover in the library to preview

the contents. You should be able

to click to the start of each chapter
in the table of contents, and click
forwards and back through the
pages using the purple arrows.
If it works as you expect, youre
ready to convert it to the Kindles
native format.
Click Convert Books and
select Mobi as the output format
from the pull-down menu at the
top-right of the conversion panel.
The input format should already
be set to ePub, our books current
format.
Click Page Setup to check
that Generic e-ink is selected as
the output prole (e-ink is the
screen technology used in most
Kindle models). If it is, click OK
to perform the conversion. From
here on, everything is automated.
The progress spinner at the
bottom of the library window will
show you its working, but when
it stops it wont be immediately
obvious where its put the
completed document. To nd it,
select the book in the library and

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

at a time, rather than moving page

by page. (see overleaf).
If it all works as you expected,
youre ready to take the nal step
and publish your book on Amazon.
Publish and be damned
Log into the Kindle Direct
Publishing Dashboard at
kdp.amazon.com using your
regular Amazon account details.
Before you can sell books through
the online store, youll need to
agree to Amazons terms and
conditions. Youll also see a
warning in the top corner of the
Dashboard screens warning you
that your account information is
incomplete. Click it and enter your
address and how youd like to be

paid. Youll have to wait until you

hit 100 of sales if you want to be
paid by cheque, but if youre happy
to accept an electronic funds
transfer (EFT) straight into your
bank account Amazon will make
a payment for every 10 earned.
Youll need to choose cheque or
EFT for each of the territories in
which Amazon sells electronic
books, but bear in mind that
foreign sales will be paid into your
account in that countrys local
currency, for which your bank may
charge a handling fee. Once youve
agreed to the terms and conditions
and entered your address and
account details, you can start the
publishing process.
Return to your bookshelf
and click Add a new title. Work

Above: The Calibre ebook processing

and management tool makes
short work of converting your
ePub-formatted publication into the
Mobipocket format used by Amazons
Kindle products, apps and
browser-based readers.
your way through the publishing
form, at the very least giving a
title, language and author name,
as well as a description of up to
4,000 characters. This is the blurb
that appears on the books listings
page, both on the Amazon web
pages and the store pages accessed
directly through the Kindle, so
think carefully about what you
write here and come up with
something that showcases
your work.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Left: After conversion to Mobipocket

format, our book is compatible with
the Kindle. Copying it to our device
lets us check that it looks like we want
and that the contents, navigation and
chapter headings work properly.

Amazon needs to know where

to le your book in its catalogue
by specifying the categories
under which it should be led.
Youll need to select the two most
relevant options, and at the same
time you can optionally type in
your own descriptive tags to help
improve its search performance
(see opposite).
Amazon sells both public
domain books and those for
which copyright still applies, and

requires all publishers to specify

into which camp their book falls.
Public domain books can still be
charged for, even if you havent
contributed to them yourself, but
they only ever attract royalties
of 35%.
Its up to you whether or not
you upload a cover image, but
wed strongly recommend it. If
you dont, Amazon will use a at
placeholder that will do little to
sell your work. Remember, the

key thing to keep in mind when

working your way through these
screens is that everything you do
should help to entice readers and
generate more sales and thus
more revenue for you. A
well-designed cover image is a key
part of this.
Ensure that whatever image
you choose it is RGB rather than
CMYK, at least 500 pixels wide
and no more than 1,280 pixels tall.
If your background is white, add a
3-pixel-thick grey border to help
it stand out on the Amazon listing
pages. This cover image isnt the
same as the one that forms part of
your book; thats embedded within
the Kindle le itself, so can be
optimised for the Kindle screen.
Still with us? Good. Youre
almost there.
Finally, you need to decide
whether you want to enable Digital
Rights Management (DRM) and
then upload your actual book le.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

DRM is a way in which your
book can be encoded so that
it cant be passed on from one
reader to another, except in line
with Amazons usual rules about
loaning books. You cant change
your mind on the DRM issue after
publishing so think very carefully
whether youre happy for people to
share your work without making
any further payments to yourself
before going beyond this point.
Amazon will check your
uploaded le and, assuming it
meets its requirements, will let
you complete the publishing
process. This involves choosing
the territories in which the book
should be sold and what royalties
youd like to earn. The standard
share is 35% of the cover price,
but if price your book between
1.49 and 6.99 and enable
lending you can hike it to a very
generous 70% in the UK and US
(see below).
Think back to what we said
earlier here: by following the
traditional publishing route,
youd be lucky to earn royalties
of around 15% on net receipts
ie, wholesale prices, after
discounts of 50% or more have
been given to retailers as an
inducement to take your book. On
a 7.99/$7.99 book, then, even
if you swing royalties of 15%, you
might earn 59p/59c. From this,

Above: Work your way through the

publishing screens to write an enticing
description of your book and add
metadata to help le it.
your agent would also take a cut of
10% to 15%.
Sell your book for 1.99/$1.99
on Kindle, on the other hand, and
you can opt for 70% royalties,
which will earn you 1.39/$1.39
per copy, while still signicantly
undercutting the mainstream
publishers and increasing your

chance of a sale. Reduce your

price yet further to the lowest
level at which youd qualify for
70% royalties, and youd still earn
over 1/$1 for each copy sold,
while encouraging readers to buy
a copy of your book because its
such a bargain when compared to
mainstream novelists work.
Dont believe us? Theres
plenty of evidence that it works.
Novelist Joe Konrath was
selling his book, The List, for
$2.99. Through the rst two

Right: Decide how much you want to

charge for your book, bearing in mind
that this will aect the level of royalties
you will receive.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

weeks of February 2011, it sold an

average of 43 copies a day, each
of which earned him royalties of
70%, pulling in $87 daily. On the
15th of the month, he dropped the
price to just 99 cents a level that
is eligible for royalties of only 35%
and sales increased massively.
It went from being the 1,078th
bestselling charged-for book in the
Kindle Store to 78th. Daily sales
increased to 533 copies
and, although the amount of
money earned by each one fell
from $2.03 to just 35 cents, his
average daily earnings now
stood at $187. Dropping the
price has more than paid for itself
in his case.
UK ebook publishers should
bear in mind when setting your
pricing that Customs and Excise
counts ebooks as services (the
service being the act of serving
the download), and as services
attract VAT this will also apply to
your ebook. Amazon adds this to
your asking price, using the rate
charged in Luxembourg at the
time of purchase. At the time of
writing, this stands at 15%, so if
youre looking to hit the magical
99p price point youll actually have
to price your book at just 86p.
From this, youll earn 30p per

Above: Always test your book on a

variety of dedicated hardware devices
or Kindle applications.
copy. At this price, youll either
need to sell a lot of copies to make
it worth your while, or be writing
and publishing books for fun
and satisfaction.
Amazon will deliver your
book electronically for free if you
opt for 35% royalties, but if you
choose 70% it will charge you 10p
(UK) or 15 cents (US and Canada)
per megabyte to send it to your
readers. The size of the book is
calculated when you upload it,
and the charge worked out
pro-rata to the nearest kilobyte.

So, a book that weighs in at

200KB would cost 2p or 3 cents
to deliver, depending on territory,
which would be deducted from
your royalties.
Although words and numbers
dont consume a great deal of
either storage space or bandwidth
when delivered, images are
considerably more space hungry,
which is why comparatively few
highly illustrative books have
traditionally been converted for
sale through the Kindle Store.
This is because they must each be
encoded and embedded within
the book, and is the reason why
the timeline graphics that we used
when formatting The Sketchbook

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Above: At the end of our publishing

and approval process our book is
online and ready for download.

of John, Constable were kept very

simple in just one colour.
Its therefore worth thinking
very carefully before including
purely decorative images in your
book, even as markers to appear
at the end of a chapter of between
sections. Often, these can be
replaced by regular characters,
which, however ornate they
appear to be, would each only
count as a single letter and so
dramatically reduce the cost of
delivering your book. Further,
its often better to simply leave a
single blank line between sections
within a chapter, as readers
are already familiar with this
convention from its widespread
use in printed books.
If you do need to include
images then be sure to use your

image editors save for web

function to intelligently compress
those you do use and minimise
your charges. Careful, judicious
use of this tool often allows you
to signicantly reduce the le size
of an image without having any
visible detrimental eect on its
appearance. This is because the
human eye is better at detecting
interference in parts of an image
demonstrating signicant change,
and so it can safely reduce the
amount of information used to
describe the make-up of atter,
simpler areas. Throwing away
this redundant data will
signicantly reduce your
delivery bills and increase your
overall income.
Due to the approval process
involved, it usually takes Amazon

two working days to publish an

English language book, after
which the Dashboards Reports
section will show your earnings
week by week. It takes longer to
publish in foreign languages, so
dont leave things until the last
moment. If youre planning on
publishing to meet a particular
deadline, plan ahead and be
prepared to have your book on
the digital shelves a little earlier
than required so that you dont
risk missing out on potential sales
later on.
Now that you know how
our book was produced, you can
nd our results and download
the ebook from amzn.to/gf7fFw
on the UK Amazon store
and amzn.to/u475sY from
Amazon.com.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Hidden Kindle features

hought your Kindle was

just an ebook reader?
Think again. Amazon has
built in several hidden features,
which are easily uncovered with a
little smart web searching.
These tips rely on having
a keyboard, so work on most
Kindle 2, Kindle DX and Kindle
Keyboard models. Some other
features, which work across all
models, such as the web browser,
arent actually hidden despite not
taking a main menu position, but
are, instead, deemed experimental.
Kindle picture viewer
Your Kindle may only have a
monochrome screen, but that
doesnt stop publishers putting
images in their books or, indeed,
on their covers. So, why shouldnt
you also take advantage of its
ability to render a good picture
and use it as a quick and easy way
to carry around a few of your own
images to enjoy on the move or
share with friends?
Transferring them to your
device is easy. Start by connecting
your Kindle to your PC or Mac
and opening its internal storage.
Here you should nd four folders:
audible, documents, music and

pictures. If any of these is missing,

you can create them using
Windows Explorer or the
OS X Finder.
Optimise your pictures
for display on the Kindles
monochrome screen to reduce
their le sizes. Optionally
convert them to greyscale and,
if possible, reduce the image
size so that its no more than
900 in any direction, vertically
or horizontally. Although your
Kindle will accept larger images
and shrink them down to t on the
screen, youre just wasting space
on your device if you force it to
do this, as it will have to throw
away a lot of the excess data in
the process. For the best results,
you could reduce the dimensions

of your image to exactly match

the number of pixels on your
particular Kindles display.
You can nd these dimensions
on the Kindle section of the
Amazon website.
Now create a folder inside
pictures to hold your new images.
Weve called ours holiday
(see below) and dropped our
pictures into it.
Eject your Kindle, and if the
new folder doesnt appear on
the homescreen press Alt + Z to
refresh the listing (if you have a
Kindle Keyboard) or turn o your
device and switch it on again.
Select the new folder, which will
appear in the list of books, and the
rst of your photos will load for
your gallery.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Above and left: The Kindles built-in

image-viewing application can access
les saved in your Photos folder and
display them in a number of dierent
orientations and sizes. If you have a
range of images in both portrait and
landscape orientation, setting the
Scale option to Fit Screen will adjust
each one so that none of it is cut o,
although you may have white borders
on two sides.

A SHORTCUT FOR TAPPING OUT NUMBERS

The accepted method of entering numbers
is to switch to the SYMbol keyboard and use
the four-way controller to hunt and peck the
onscreen characters to enter each one (see left).
This is eective, but time consuming. If you only
want to enter numbers and you have a Kindle
Keyboard, you can save time by instead holding
the Alt button while pressing the top row of
letter keys. Q to O give you the numbers 1 to 9,
while P will give you a zero. Release Alt to return
to using regular letters.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Left: The Kindles built-in calculator
is surprisingly accomplished and
could well be able enough to replace
a regular calculator when you dont
have one to hand. These abilities are
one of the benets of the Kindles
operating system being built on top of
a version of Linux.

Use the regular forwards

and back page-turning buttons
to move through the album, and
press the Aa button to change
the gallery options (see opposite
page), choosing whether to show
the whole of the image on screen
or to stretch it to t the height or
width, and whether you want to
rotate your Kindle display, which
works well with landscape shots.
Music while you read
Who doesnt like to listen to some
music while they read their book?
If you have a Kindle Keyboard
then youve got this covered.
Connect your Kindle to your
Mac or PC, open its internal
storage using a regular Finder or
Windows Explorer window, and
drop a selection of MP3 tracks into
the music folder (you can create
this folder if it doesnt exist).
Safely disconnect your
Kindle and choose a book to

read. To listen to your music in

the background, hold Alt while
pressing Space; do the same to
stop the music, and press Alt + F
to skip to the next track.

calculation and see the result

(see above).
You can perform some pretty
advanced sums in this way, using
braces to mark out parts of a sum
that should be performed rst,
with the answer to that part used
in the rest of the calculation, and
the caret symbol (^) to mark
powers. In this respect, 100^2
would be equivalent to 1002.
Kindle for geeks

Kindle calculator
The Kindle has an adapted Linux
operating system under its hood,
which in places pokes out through
the reading interface, allowing
you to take advantage of some
of its core features, including
maths functions.
To use your Kindle as
a calculator, return to the
homescreen (this doesnt work
from any of the reading screens)
and call up the search box.
Clear any content for the box
and replace it with your sum (see
our Quick Tip on the previous
page for a shortcut for entering
numbers). When youve nished
tapping in your sum, select
Search my items to execute the

Your Kindle isnt as dumb as it

looks. In reality, it keeps an eye
on everything you do and notes
it down in a log. For the truly
technical who want to see whats
been going on in the background,
go to the homescreen and type
;debugOn followed by Return.
Now type ;dumpMessages and
again press Return. Your Kindle
will freeze for a few seconds as it
retrieves all of the data and then
drop it into your list of books,
ready to be read.
For a full set of debug menu
options, type ~help and press
Return to call up a panel showing
your options, each of which
can be typed as above (see
opposite page).

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Right: Even if you havent downloaded
a book in Audible audiobook format,
you can still have your Kindle read it
aloud to you if your device has audio
features. The speed and tone of the
voice can be tweaked and its well
worth experimenting until you nd a
setting that sounds pleasing to you.

Below: The Kindle operating system

includes diagnostics commands that
you can use to call up information
about its settings and status.

Text to speech
Too tired to keep reading but
want to nish your book? Kindle
Keyboard users can press Shift
+ SYM to activate its text-tospeech engine, which will read
your book aloud. The results are
surprisingly good, and not just for
use by bookworms with a visual
impairment. Dont forget to plug
in headphones if you dont want
to disturb those around you on
public transport. Unfortunately,
Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite
dont have audio abilities.
Pressing the AA button when
using text to speech opens not the
regular font control panel but the
integrated speech controls (see
above), allowing you to change the
speed at which the book is read
out and which voice to use.
In our experience, the male
voice seems to give a smoother,
less jumpy result, but slowing
down the female voice improves it
if you prefer her tones.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Kindle games
If youre buying a Kindle to play
games, invest in a Kindle Fire,
which will open up access to the
Amazon Appstore, from which you
can download a wide variety of
top games, including Words With
Friends and Angry Birds.
If you have a Kindle 2 or
Kindle Keyboard, however, and
want a quick game or two to pass
the time while youre waiting for
an appointment, youll nd two
hidden in the operating system.
Return to the homescreen
and press Shift+Alt+M to switch
to Mine Sweeper (see above left).

Windows users will remember

this game, but for anyone who
hasnt played it your Kindle has
hidden 10 sea mines in an ocean
thats eight squares wide and 10
deep. Your task is to nd them all
without hitting any of them. Use
the four-way controller to move
your position around the board,
and press the central button to
uncover the highlighted square.
Your Kindle gives you some help
by showing how many mines
border any particular square, to
help you avoid a nasty surprise.
If you turn up a square
bordered by no mines, Mine
Sweeper will reveal a whole block

of empty squares until it reaches a

strip that does border a mine.
Once youve mastered Mine
Sweeper, try your hand at GoMoku
(see above right). This is like
Connect 4 on a grand scale. Your
task is to line up ve of your X
characters in a row, horizontally,
vertically or diagonally. Your
Kindle will be trying to do the
same thing while also blocking you
as you get closer to your goal. You
need to keep an eye on what its
doing, as if it achieves ve in a row
before you, youve lost.
To exit the games, press the
Home button to return to your list
of books.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Sending documents
to your Kindle wirelessly

he Kindle is a book reader

at heart. However, books
can come in a wide
variety of formats. Most of us
think of a traditional book as
a bound collection of pages,
which in Kindle format has been
transformed into a owing text le
with changeable font faces, text
sizes and line spacing.
However, the Kindle can also
handle a wide range of other
document types, including PDF,
plain text, Word DOC and DOCX,
JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and others,
so you can read everything from
simple characters and numbers to
surprisingly complex document
layouts, so long as the elements
arent too small to clearly make
out on the Kindle screen.
As weve already pointed out,
you can load documents onto your
Kindle directly by connecting it
using the bundled USB cable and
dragging them onto the Kindles
internal storage using your Mac or
PCs regular lesystem. However,
that isnt always the most
convenient way to move them
from your computer. There will be
times when you dont have your
USB cable to hand, such as when
travelling on holiday, or when you
cant physically access the USB

UPLOADED DOCUMENTS AND AMAZON CLOUD

When your document arrives on your Kindle, it will be led under your
email address on the Kindles homescreen.
At the same time, it will be saved in your account on Amazons
Cloud storage servers so that you can access it again in the future,
using either another Kindle in particular, the Kindle Fire or a regular
computer through a browser or synchronised folder.
Every Cloud account comes equipped with 5GB of free Cloud
storage, which is a generous allocation, but will nonetheless ll up over
time, particularly if you email documents to your Kindle for review.
If youre getting close to your limit, youll need to delete your older
documents if you dont want to pay for additional storage. If you dont
have a Kindle Fire, you can do this through a regular browser.
Log into your Amazon Cloud account through amazon.com/
clouddrive and click Documents in the left-hand sidebar. The size of
each document is listed beside its name, so you can see which would
make the biggest dierence if removed from your Drive.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

port because youre not using
your own computer. On those
occasions, youll want to use the
second option: wireless transfer.

Walkthrough

Transferring les wirelessly

Every Kindle has a Wi-Fi
connection and, depending on the
model you chose to buy, you may
also have built-in 3G, which will
allow you to download books
and documents over the mobile
phone network.
Before doing so, you need to
authorise your email addresses to
send documents to your Kindle.
This is an anti-spam measure that
Amazon implemented to prevent
people from sending random
documents to your Kindle device,
using up your storage space and
Amazons network bandwidth.
To do this, click Kindle |
Manage Your Kindle | Personal
Document Settings and click the
link to Add a new approved email
address. Double-check before
clicking Add Address and then
log out.
Sending documents over
Wi-Fi is free, but using 3G can
incur charges to cover the cost of
passing the data over the network.

QUICK TIP
Document transfers are
one-way-only operations. You
cant transfer documents o
your e-ink Kindle by email or
any other wireless means, so
dont lose your USB cable.

Skill level

Beginner a simple task that everyone

can complete

Time required

Around ve minutes

Equipment

Any Kindle model, including previous

versions, plus a computer with a live
internet connection and an email client

Step by step
1.

Start by checking the email address to which you need to send your
documents. This will have been set by Amazon and is based on your
Amazon account name. Find it by pressing the Kindle menu button
and then selecting Settings from the drop-down menu.

Navigate to the second page of the settings utility to nd your

address under the Send-to-Kindle Email section. It will take the
form of <username>@kindle.com.

If youre not happy with your assigned address, you can specify
a new one through your Amazon account. Log in using a regular
browser (if youre using a Kindle Fire, you can also use the browser
there) and click or tap Kindle | Manage Your Kindle | Personal
Document Settings.
Here youll nd details of the email address assigned to each of
your Kindles. To change one of them, click the Edit button at the end
of its entry and enter a new username. You cant change the @kindle.
com part of the address, as that allows the document to rst pass
through Amazons own servers before making its way to your device.
Very obvious names will already have been taken, so you may
have to use a little trial and error to nd one that remains available
if you have a common name. Theres no reason, though, why you
should have an address thats in any way associated with any part of
your actual name.

Assuming youre happy with your assigned address, you can send
your rst document. Start a new email using your regular email or
webmail application, addressed to your Kindles email address, and
attach the le you want to convert for reading on your device.
Youll receive an email conrming the transfer and, if wireless
or 3G is active on your device, the document will appear on your
homescreen automatically.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Subscribing to newspapers
and magazines on your Kindle

ts not only LCD-based devices

like the Kindle Fire that allow
you to subscribe to newspapers
and magazines: you can also do it
on a regular e-ink-based Kindle.
Rather than heading to your
chosen newspapers homepage,
you subscribe through the Amazon
Kindle Store, in much the same
way as youd download a book.
The easiest way to do this, of
course, is through a regular
browser. Point it towards the
Amazon homepage, then select
Kindle in the Stores section, and
Newsstand from the top menu
(see right) to call up a list of
newspapers that have formatted
their content for delivery through
the Kindle network.
Not every newspaper is
included, naturally, but the
catalogue does include a broad

selection from around the world,

making this a cost-eective way to
keep in touch with the news from
abroad (or, indeed, from home if
youre an ex-pat living overseas)
without having to pay for an
imported newspaper or locally
printed equivalent, which often

doesnt include all of the pages of

the complete item.
Subscriptions come with a free
14-day trial, so choose your paper
and then click Subscribe with
1-Click, with the Kindle to which
you want the publication sent
selected in the Deliver to: menu.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Your Kindle will download

each new edition of the newspaper
automatically and position it on
the homepage (see bottom left,
opposite). Tap the cover to open
the most recent update.
The newspaper opens with
a designed contents page (see
bottom right, opposite) that links
both to the main stories and to the
various sections within it. Often,
as is the case of The Guardian,
here, these follow the sections with
which youll already be familiar
from the printed publication.
Here, tapping the UK news
link in the grab above would open
an index of just the stories led
under UK news in this particular
issue, laid out in a similar manner
to the opening screen.

This is by far the most visual

way to navigate the newspaper
and works in much the same
exploratory manner as reading a
regular printed publication, but if
you nd yourself pressed for time
or want to get a quick overview
of the contents of your paper,
tap close to the top of the screen
to open the menu and tap the
rectangular icon with two columns
of horizontal lines running down.
This opens a tabbed interface
(see above left) through which you
can skim-read the various section
contents by tapping through the
section names in the rst column
and reading o the headlines in
the second column. Tapping a
headline opens the original article
full screen (see above right).

Article pages work in exactly

the same way as book pages. Tap
the right to move onto the next
page, and tap the left to turn back
a page.
You can search for denitions
and look up terms in Wikipedia,
and you can also save complete
articles to your clippings book.
To do this, tap at the top of the
screen to open the menu and tap
Clip This Article.
If you dont want to pay for
your newspaper once your free
subscription comes to an end,
return to the Kindle management
pages in your Amazon account
through a regular browser and
click Subscription Settings in
the sidebar, then Action and
Cancel Subscription.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Managing your Kindle remotely

lthough every Kindle has

all the tools you need to
manage it built into its
operating system, its often faster
not to mention more convenient
to manage it remotely from any
internet-connected PC or Mac.
This allows you to use a
full-sized keyboard and mouse,
along with your regular browser,
to perform what might otherwise
be ddly tasks if you were
restricted to using the Kindles
physical or onscreen keyboard and
its four-way controller.
It also means that you arent
restricted to using just the
built-in Kindle interface when
youre using the Kindle Store, so
you can open multiple pages at
once in discrete browser tabs and
switch between them if you want
to compare several books.
Weve already seen how easy
it is to buy books though a regular
browser and send them to your
Kindle. Here well take a closer
look at the other actions you can
perform from the browser using
the Kindle Dashboard, through
which Amazon lets you
access each of your registered
Kindle devices.
Get started by picking Kindle
| Manage Your Kindle from the

sidebar. If you havent recently

entered your password, youll
need to add it on the next screen
to progress any further so that
Amazon can verify that youre
authorised to manipulate
the account.
Although youll spend most
of your time reading books on
your Kindle, its also capable of
downloading newspapers and
magazines and subscribing to
blogs, with any daily, weekly
or monthly updates published
by each one automatically
downloaded to your device on
a rolling subscription, as weve
already shown you.
You can also, of course, send
your own documents to the
Kindle, again from the comfort of
a regular browser.
Authorising document uploads
One of the simplest ways to get
new content onto your Kindle,
other than books bought directly
from Amazon, is to email it to
the address associated with each
device. This is displayed on the
top line of its own section on the
Dashboard (see opposite page).
Obviously, you dont want just
anyone sending documents to

your device, as it would be a target

for spammers, so Amazon has put
a number of controls in place that
keep it protected.
To prevent your Kindle
being spammed, click Personal
Document Settings in the sidebar
and rst choose the email
addresses at which you want
each Kindle to receive incoming
documents. Next, scroll down to
the Approved Personal Document
E-mail List section and specify
which addresses can send you
documents, and add your own
day-to-day email address. These
will now be the only addresses
that can send documents to your
device, eectively locking out
anyone else who might try to send
it a le.
This is eectively a doublecheck, which makes it impossible
for anyone who may have
discovered your Kindles dedicated
email address from cluttering
up your device and eating into
its storage unless youve also
authorised them to send you
documents, or theyve gained
access to one of your authorised
email addresses.
You can store up to 5GB of
documents in your online Kindle
library, as well as on your Kindle

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

NAVIGATE THE KINDLE DASHBOARD
Transfer documents by
emailing them to this address.
You need a dierent address
for each device.

Use this menu to switch

between the dierent media
registered to your account.

Want to sell or give away

your Kindle? Be sure to use
the Deregister option here to
unlink it from your account.
You can also deregister Kindle
apps using the table below.

Turn o synchronisation if you

and a friend are reading the
same book, bought on the
same account, on dierent
Kindles, to prevent one from
aecting the others page
position.

itself. This feature is turned on by

default, but you can disable it by
clicking Edit in the Dashboards
Personal Document Archiving
section.
Changing your home store
If you bought your Kindle directly
from Amazon, it will be registered
to the national store through
which you bought it. This makes it
easy to start buying and enjoying

content right away. If, for any

reason, you need to change to an
alternative national store, perhaps
because youve recently moved
overseas, click Country Settings,
followed by the Learn More link
(clicking the Change link at the
end of the current country line
only lets you update your address).
UK customers cant simply
go shopping in the US store
(and vice versa) as though they
were tourists. Instead, you must

transfer your account by clicking

the Learn about transferring your
Kindle account to Amazon.com
(or .co.uk) link and authorising
the wholesale device transfer.
This will switch all of your
existing purchases to your newly
selected Amazon country account
and charge you in the new local
currency for future purchases.
Depending on your bank, you
may incur currency conversion
fees or commission.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Walkthrough

Skill level
Beginner a simple task
that everyone can complete
Time required
Around ve minutes
Equipment
Kindle, Kindle Touch,
Kindle Keyboard, Kindle
Paperwhite or Kindle
Fire, including previousgeneration devices

Managing your Kindle library

through a browser
1.

Log into your account through

your home countrys Amazon
homepage and select Kindle
| Manage Your Kindle from
the Departments panel in the
sidebar on the left-hand side
of the page.
By default, this calls up
a list of books youve bought
on any one of your hardware
Kindle devices or Kindle
apps installed on a thirdparty device, such as a tablet,
smartphone or iPod touch.
You can switch to other
media types by clicking them
in the sidebar, and expand the
details of each bought item
by clicking the + beside its
name. Expand the details of
one of your books now to start
managing your Kindle. Here
weve called up the full details
of One Flew Over the Cuckoos
Nest by Ken Kesey.

2. Click the View Product

Page link to open the books
original location in Amazons
catalogue, or the Order
Details link to view full details
of your own particular order
for that title, including how
much you paid, when you
bought it and Amazons order
reference. You can also print
an order summary here if you

bought the book for business

purposes and need a receipt or
proof of purchase to claim it
back on expenses.
3. Return to the list of products
youve downloaded to perform
the full set of management
tasks. Click the Actions...
button on the right to call up
a menu that allows you to

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

DRM

either delete the book from

your library or send it to other
Kindle devices. Dont delete a
book from here without due
care, as if you later want to
read it again youll have to
purchase a new copy. Deleting
a book from your Kindle, on
the other hand, leaves it in
this list so you can download
another copy for free.

4. Choose Deliver to my...

and then select the device
youd like to send it to
using Amazons Whispernet
network over either its 3G or
Wi-Fi connection, depending
on your model. All of your
hardware Kindles and any
registered Kindle apps will
already be listed here, so all
you need to do is choose one.

Printed and digital books

are fundamentally dierent.
Copying and distributing a
physical volume is dicult,
taking a lot of copying and
printing. Digital books, on the
other hand, are easy to copy
and require only that you drag
the book le from one location
to another to create a duplicate.
For this reason, Amazon
and other ebook retailers
employ DRM Digital Rights
Management which is a
means of encoding the book
so that its uniquely tied to one
product or account. In the case
of Amazon and the Kindle, its
tied to your account so that you
can read it on multiple devices,
such as a Kindle, tablet and
smartphone.
This will be the case even
if you choose to transfer the
book using USB, as Amazon will
need to know on which device
you want to use it so that it can
associate the book with the
account managing that Kindle.
This prevents it being copied
o the Kindle again through the
Windows or Mac le manager
and passed onto another
customer.
Fortunately, this all happens
entirely transparently and you
dont need to either understand
it or administer it. It also means
that publishers can have
condence in the system and
will continue using it, thus
increasing our reading choice.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Setting up your Kindle to sync

with Instapaper

ow that you know how to

send documents to your
Kindle, you can link it to
an Instapaper account to send it
documents that you dont have
time to read during your regular
browsing. Instapaper is a free
service that allows you to mark
pages for reading later on using a
button on your regular desktop,
laptop or tablet browser toolbar.
Sign up at www.instapaper.com,
and drag the toolbar button into
your browser (you may need to
make the Bookmarks bar visible).
Associate your Instapaper and
Kindle accounts, and whenever
you mark a page you dont have
time to read, it will appear on your
Kindle within 24 hours of being
saved from your browser.

Step by step
1.

Log into your Instapaper

account using a regular web
browser and visit www.
instapaper.com/user/kindle
to set up forwarding on
your account.
Start by checking the box
to Send my Unread articles
to my Kindle automatically
and choose from the dropdown boxes whether youd
like them sending daily or
weekly and how many unread
articles there should be in
your reading queue to trigger
a delivery. If you choose to
have new items delivered
weekly then a bundle of all
of your saved content will

be dispatched on Friday
mornings.
Weve set ours to 1 new
article and daily deliveries so
that as soon as weve added
a new article that we want
to read it will be delivered to
our Kindle within 24 hours.
That way, it should always
be ready for us to pick up
on our morning commute
and we wont nd ourselves
inundated with overdue
reading as we approach the
end of the week.
You now need to
authorise Instapaper to load
content onto your Kindle.
This is a two-stage process
that takes place half on the
Instapaper site and half on

QUICK TIP
Every time a new document is
emailed to your Kindle, Amazon
will send you an email to let you
know that its ready for reading.
These are purely for your own
information and, so long as the
documents are only coming
from your authorised addresses,
they can be deleted or ignored.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

your Kindle Dashboard. Start
by entering your Kindle email
address, copying it from your
Kindle Dashboard to the box
on your Instapaper account
(its the address that ends
kindle.com).
If youre happy to only
have documents delivered
over Wi-Fi, select @free.
kindle.com as the extension.
If you have a 3G-enabled
Kindle and would also like
les to be delivered over the
mobile network then leave it
set to @kindle.com, although
note that youll be charged a
fee for delivery, depending on
the size of the archive, if you
choose this.
Now head for your Kindle
Dashboard and add the
Instapaper address shown
in green on the Instapaper
Manage your Kindle screen
to the list of approved email
addresses so that Amazon
doesnt reject incoming
archives as spam.

Walkthrough
Skill level

Intermediate

Time required

Around ve minutes

Equipment

Kindle, Kindle Touch, Kindle Paperwhite

or Kindle Keyboard, including previousgeneration devices; free Instapaper account

Click Add Address

on the Kindle Dashboard
and Save changes on the
Instapaper site, then check
that everything is working
by clicking Send now on
the Instapaper page to
immediately send an archive
of your currently saved
documents from Instapaper
to your Kindle.
3.

If your Kindle is switched on

and has an active internet
connection, youll soon see
an archive of your unread
documents appear on the
homescreen. This will have
the title Instapaper and,
because you may receive

several such archives before

youve read them, will sport
the current date as the author.
It can be opened in exactly the
same way as a regular book.
4.

By bundling all of your

documents together,
Instapaper has built a fully
indexed collection. The table
of contents gives links to
each one, and you can use
the edges of the four-way
controller to skip forwards
and backwards to the start
of each item. Use the regular
page-turning controls to read
the individual screens inside
each one as you would with a
normal downloaded book.

Kindle
Fire HD

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Kindle Fire, Kindle Fire HD

and Kindle Fire HDX

indle Fire is Amazons most

ambitious reading device
to date. With a back-lit
colour LCD screen, its a fully
edged Android-based tablet
computer, on which readers can
install their own applications, as
well as download books, videos
and music from the Amazon
online store. For anyone who
wants to read magazines just as
much as they do books, its a great
choice, allowing them to enjoy
pages in rich colour, packed with
graphics and original layouts.
The latest batch of releases
sees the introduction of the
third-generation products. The
original 7in Kindle Fire has been

retired, with the 7in Fire HD

now occupying the entry-level
spot. These latter additions are
upgraded in many ways, and
also include Dolby Digital audio
processing and stereo speakers.
The Kindle Fire range draws
on each of Amazons various
businesses and makes their
contents available in your hand.
So, not only might you buy your
books, music and movies from
Amazon, you can also consume
them on a device thats guaranteed
to be compatible. Each of these
plays a part in making the Fire a
success, feeding in up-to-date info
and making it possible to store
your own content online.

Amazon Appstore
Unlike the e-ink-based Kindle
readers, the Fire HD and
Fire HDX can be expanded
through the installation of
third-party applications. These
are downloaded through the
integrated Amazon Appstore.
Opened in March 2011,
the Appstore was the biggest
hint of all that Amazon was
looking to build its own tablet
computer. At the time of launch,
it had slightly fewer than 4,000
applications in its catalogue, but
this has since grown. It splits
revenue with developers on a
70%/30% basis, in a very similar
manner to its books operation,
with developers taking the larger
proportion and Amazon retaining
the rest to cover, among other
things, merchant processing and
advertising on its digital shelves.
The Appstore includes many
of the titles that have proved
themselves to be big successes on
rival platforms, such as Cut the
Rope, Angry Birds and Autodesks
SketchBook Mobile. This, perhaps
more than anything else apart
from its bargain price, makes the
Fire the rst serious competitor to
Apples market-leading iPad.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Left: The Kindle Fire is a fully edged
tablet computer, and because its
intimately tied to Amazons various
online stores it can call on a wealth of
entertainment media, such as lms,
TV shows, music and books, much of
which can be stored in the Amazon
Cloud and streamed when required.

Amazon Silk
Every Kindle includes a web
browser. However, in the case
of the regular Kindle, Kindle
Paperwhite and Kindle Keyboard,
Amazon is very honest about it
being an experimental part of
the e-readers operating system.
Not so with the various Kindle
Fire devices, in which the web
browser is an integral and very
important part of the way the
tablet works. All Kindles have
built-in Wi-Fi and many also
feature 4G connectivity to the cell
network, so theyre designed to be
take-anywhere, online devices that
let you browse the web wirelessly
without unpacking your bulky
notebook computer.

The browser includes a

technology that Amazon has
termed Silk, which uses the
companys enormous Cloud
computing server farm to increase
the speed at which you can browse
the web.
As Amazon explains, a typical
web page isnt merely a collection
of text and images gathered from
one single server. On average, each
page you visit calls on around 80
les, which in turn are scattered
across up to 13 dierent domains.
These les include photos, text,
stylesheets, remotely hosted fonts
and, of course, advertisements.
Many of these resources are
actually hosted on Amazons own
servers the whole time, while
others are hosted elsewhere, on
servers with which Amazons
Cloud computing infrastructure
shares a direct series of fast
backbone connections, which
together form the underlying
fabric of the internet.
Whenever you tap in the
address of a page or click a link
in the Fires browser, therefore,
its rst sent to Amazons Elastic
Compute Cloud servers, which
break down the request into
smaller parts, working out which
bits it would be faster for it to

collect itself, and which bits your

Fire should go o and nd on its
own from elsewhere on the web.
By splitting the workload
in this way, it shortens the time
taken to reconstruct the page on
your tablets screen, making the
whole thing feel more responsive
and allowing you to get more done
in less time.
Online content
Manufacturers have quickly come
to the realisation that you dont
buy a tablet for its specs; you buy
it because of what it can do and,
more importantly, what it can
download.
Like the iPad, the Kindle Fire
is tied to its manufacturers own
online store, which gives Amazon
a head start here over many of
its non-Apple rivals. Its spent
years building up a varied, yet
integrated set of businesses, which
together form a virtual shopping
mall through which you can buy
movie downloads, music and
applications.
These are organised on
the Kindle Fires shelves and
categorised using the tabs at the
top of the screen.
Not all of them are shipped
directly through the Amazon
parent brand, as the company has
many subsidiary businesses, such
as LoveFilm, which help provide
content, and IMDB, the Internet
Movie Database, that feed in
supplementary data for the X-Ray
features that give you more info
about your media consumption.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Kindle Fire HD/HDX orientation

Headphone
socket

Volume control
rocker

Power
switch

Screen with resolution of

1,280 x 800 (Fire HD 7in)
1,920 x 1,200 (HD 8.9in/
HDX 7in)
2,560 x 1,600 (HDX 8.9in)

USB port (also used

for charging and
data sharing)

HDMI video port

Integrated video
camera

Inside: Bluetooth and

Wireless Ethernet
networking hardware

Twin stereo speakers at

rear (with Dolby support on
Kindle Fire HD and HDX)

Tap to return to
the homescreen

Internal storage of
16GB/32GB (Fire HD) or
16GB/32GB/64GB (Fire
HDX)

Tap to step back to

previous screen

Contextsensitive menu

Search current
module

Go to saved
favourites

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Getting your Kindle Fire HD

and HDX online using Wi-Fi
1

Put your nger on the clock at the

top of your Kindles homescreen
and drag it down. This opens
up the general settings screen,
from which you can access the
individual settings zones. This
screen also shows you messages,
like how many emails youve still
got to read and whether youre
connected to a low-powered
USB source and thus risk draining
the battery.
Tap the Wireless button at the
top of the screen to open the Wi-Fi
settings options, as seen above.
Make sure the Airplane Mode is
switched o and Wi-Fi is switched
on, so you can see your networks.

Your Kindle Fire will list all

of the networks that are in range.
In our case, thats three networks
called ovingo, clickety click
and zipzip (1). Ovingo gives by
far the strongest signal from the
Kindle Fires current position, so
thats the one well set up as our
internet access point.
Any network with a padlock
icon on its wireless strength icon
as is the case for each of these
three networks is protected
by a pass key. Your Kindle Fire
will automatically select the
appropriate security setting for
your chosen network and ask for
the required password (2).

Provided you entered the

correct password and your
network access point is set up
to distribute IP addresses on
your network, your Kindle will
negotiate with the network
hardware and connect itself.
You can tell that its successfully
connected, as the wireless strength
indicator turns orange and the
padlock is replaced with a tick (3).
If you ever need to disconnect
from your wireless network,
simply return to this screen and
tap the O button beside Wi-Fi.
If you want to switch to another
network, tap its name and repeat
these three steps.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Setting up your Kindle Fire HD

and HDX

hen your Kindle Fire

arrives, depending
on how and from
whom you bought it, you may nd
that its little more than a pretty
slate. To get the most out of it,
you need to hook it up to your
Amazon account.
This is a simple process that
takes only a couple of seconds,
but it relies on you having your
Fire already set up to access
your wireless network. If you
havent yet done this, follow the
instructions on the previous page,
and then work your way through
the steps on this spread.

FIRE TOOLBAR
The toolbar lets you access the
most common Kindle settings,
and also calls up an information
screen. To access it, place your
nger at the top of the screen,
on top of the clock, and drag
down, then use the buttons to
navigate the preferences.

When you rst unbox your Kindle,

unless its already been activated
by Amazon prior to dispatch,
it will be in its unregistered,
unactivated state (1). You can
still perform limited functions,
and access any media that you
load onto it by dragging it across
using the bundled USB cable,
which is also used to charge it
(an adaptor plug is an optional
extra purchase), but if you want
to read your Kindle books, access
your Amazon Cloud account, or
buy new music, movies and TV
content, youll need to link it to
your existing Amazon account.

Put your nger on the clock at

the top of the screen in either
orientation (were holding ours
upright, but it works just as well in
landscape mode) and slide it down
the screen. This calls up the Kindle
Fire toolbar (see left).
Tap the More icon on the far
right of the toolbar to open the
complete list of available settings.
From here, you can manage
Parental Controls, wireless
networking (see previous page),
the way the keyboard works and
of most interest to us in this
instance your Amazon account.
Tap the entry for My Account (2).

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Since your Kindle isnt yet

associated with an Amazon
account, there isnt much to see
on the screen that follows, except
for a Register button. Tap this
and enter the email address and
password that you usually use
to access your Kindle account
through a regular browser (3).
If you cant remember your
password, youll be able to source
a reminder from the Amazon site.
Once youve entered your
account credentials, tap the
Register button to complete the
process and send the details over
to the Kindle servers.

So long as your Kindle receives a

positive response from the servers,
it logs into your account and
downloads the necessary data that
allows it to access your media.
Although it has only a
maximum of 64GB of storage,
your Kindle Fire HD or Fire HDX
can access the whole of your back
catalogue of content, which you
can download to your new device
with a single tap (4).
This brings along with it any
supplementary data such as your
current position within a book,
and any highights and notes
youve added.

FIRE STATUS BAR

The status bar that runs across
the top of your Kindle Fire
homescreen and many apps
gives you an at-a-glance
overview of notications and
statuses. It saves you hunting
around elsewhere on your
Kindle for information thats
frequently updated throughout
the day and between uses that
you might otherwise miss. If
you cant see it, return to the
homescreen, as its always there.
Working from left to right, it
shows the name under which
your Kindle is registered with
Amazon (you can change this
through the Kindle Dashboard
by logging into your account
using a regular browser), with
the number of notications to
its right. Tapping this opens
the notication screen with a
summary of your unread emails
and any application notices
you might have missed.
Tapping any of the notications
opens the associated
application, while tapping
Clear All empties the list. The
USB notication will only
disappear when you disconnect
your device.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Getting content onto

(and o) your Kindle Fire

he ease with which you can

get content onto and o
your Kindle Fire depends
on the kind of content you want
to use and the platforms between
which youre moving it.
Moving content on a
Windows-based PC
The process of moving content
onto and o your Kindle manually
is easiest if youre a Windows user.
Simply plug in your Kindle
using the supplied USB cable and
it will mount on your system like a
regular external drive in Windows
Explorer. Click it to explore its

contents and to drag content onto

and o it (see below).
When youve nished
managing your les, make sure
you safely eject your Kindle from
Windows by right-clicking the
USB icon in the system tray
and selecting the option to eject
the device.
Moving content on a Mac
If youre using a Mac then things
are a little more complicated,
as the Kindle Fire wont mount
directly in the operating system
as it did with the previous version
Kindle Fire.

To exchange media les over

USB with a Mac, its therefore
rst necessary to download the
Android File Transfer utility,
which is free, from www.android.
com/letransfer. (If you need it
on your computer, youll see the
dialogue box above.)
This mounts the Kindle Fire
in a separate application window,
with each of the folders on the
device collapsed using disclosure
triangles. Click on the triangles to
view the contents of each folder,
and you can then drag them out
to other folders on your Mac in a
new Finder window, and drag in
les from your Mac in the opposite
direction (see opposite page).
You can use this same tool
to create new folders on your
Kindle by clicking the + folder
icon on the far right-hand end of
the toolbar, and delete les using
Command-Backspace in the usual

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Mac manner, but beware that
when you do that the les arent
sent to a trash area from which
they can be recovered, but deleted
immediately, entirely and cant
be reinstated.
Saving images on the Kindle
There will be times when you
want to save images that you come
across on the web. You can do this
directly on the Kindle Fire and
theyll be stored in a sub-folder of
the pictures folder.
This is easily done by holding
down your nger on the image you
want to save in the Kindle browser
and selecting the Save option from
the menu that pops up after a
couple of seconds.
To later access your images,
either connect your Kindle to your
computer and download them
over USB, as explained above, or
return to the Kindle homescreen

and tap Photos on the top-level

content menu that runs across the
top of the screen.
From here, tap the Download
album to access all of the images
youve saved from the web.
Your image downloads will
also be referenced on the
notications screen that appears
when you drag down your nger
from the clock.
Creating screen grabs
When you want to capture an
image of what you can see on your
screen, hold down the volume and
power buttons simultaneously for
a second. The resulting grab will
be saved in a Screenshots album in
the Photos application.

wirelessly by email. Emailing

screen grabs and saved photos
from your albums is one of the
simplest means of transferring
them to a regular computer, while
emailing content in the opposite
direction lets you save it directly
from the contents of the email,
even if you choose not to use
the address associated with
your device on the Amazon
Kindle Dashboard.
Unfortunately, none of the
Kindle Fire devices let you transfer
content by saving it to an SD card
to be inserted, as they dont have
compatible slots. If you want to
transfer using a more conventional
ling system, it will therefore be
necessary to use Amazons Cloud
service as an intermediary.

Email transfers and online storage

Of course, you can also transfer
content onto and o your Kindle

USB STATUS
The whole time your Kindle is
connected to your computer,
dragging down on the clock
will reveal the notications area,
which shows you the status of
the connection. In the example
below, our Kindle is connected
as a media device, meaning
it can receive and serve up
les, and its not charging
simultaneously because
the USB port isnt giving up
enough power.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Setting up your email

ne of the best things

about having a tablet
computer like the Kindle
Fire is that it allows you to keep
in touch with friends, family and
business contacts when youre
on the move by way of email.
Even with just the entry-level
7in screen, which is considerably
smaller than that on the Apple
iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab, the
keyboard remains very usable, and
with predictive corrections that
let you tap a suggested word as it
appears above the keys you can
tap out long messages quickly.
The Android-based Kindle
Fire operating system therefore
includes an email client as one
of its pre-installed components,
so you dont need to visit the
Appstore and hunt through the
various options to nd the one
that best suits your needs.
It has a built-in setup process
that walks you through the process
of adding your own account
details, so that within just ve
minutes, as long as you have all of
your login credentials and other
data to hand, you can be sending
your rst message.
All of your applications,
including the email client, are
installed in the Apps section.

100

Amazon has built a huge

server farm to sit behind the Kindle
and Kindle Fire devices, which
stores all of the content associated
with your device. This allows
you to keep the bare minimum
installed on the device itself so you
dont use up its precious limited
storage space. Applications stored
on the Cloud can be installed with
a single tap (1).
Open the applications
viewer by tapping Apps from the
homescreen and then tap the
Device button. If the email client
appears here, tap it to open it. If
not, tap the Cloud button, then its
icon, to download from the server.

As soon as the email client

has downloaded and launched, it
will recognise that you dont have
any accounts set up, so will open
with a view of the new account
wizard (2).
It knows how various accounts
should be congured already,
which greatly simplies the
process of adding your own. If
your account is one of the types
listed below, tap it on this screen
to move onto the next step. If it
isnt, tap Other provider. This
is the option youd select if you
have an IMAP or POP3 account
provided by your ISP that you
wanted to use on your Kindle.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Walkthrough

Were setting up a personal

domain email address thats
hosted on Googles Apps service.
This means weve been able to tap
the Gmail option and the Kindle
has already entered a lot of the
details that we need to use to
access the service (3).
If youre setting up anything
other than the preset account
types and run into problems
connecting with the server, its
likely to be a security issue. Check
with your ISP whether you need to
have SSL active when logging in,
as a mismatch in this area is one
of the most common problems in
setting up an email account.

Skill level

Beginner a simple task that everyone

can complete

Time required

Around ve minutes

Equipment

Kindle Fire, Fire HD or Fire HDX

Some account types oer to set

up supplementary services, such
as synchronising your contacts
and calendar with the version
you keep on the server. This is a
smart move, as it means that any
data you enter on your Kindle will
automatically be synced back to a
remote computer, where it will be
backed up and from which it can
be retrieved should you ever lose
your Kindle.
Decide whether you want to
take advantage of these options
and selectively clear the check
boxes from beside any of the ones
that you dont intend to use on
your Kindle (4).

Click Save one nal time to

complete the process of setting up
your email account and youll be
immediately taken to the inbox
view. As long as you have an active
wireless internet connection, it
will download the most recent
messages from the server (5).
The rst synchronisation will
take longer than usual, as your
Kindle needs to download a large
number of emails from the server.
To send a message, tap the
New button. Entering a contacts
name pulls their address from the
Contacts application so you dont
need to remember which address
relates to which person.

101

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Purchasing and organising

Kindle Fire applications

he Kindle Fire, Samsung

Galaxy Tab, Google Nexus
and Apple iPad are the
four leading tablet computers
for one very good reason: theyre
all well supported by third-party
developers who sell their wares
through shops that are tied
directly to each tablets operating
system. This enables every owner
to make their tablet their own
by supplementing the apps that
come pre-installed.
The range of applications
available for the Kindle is
impressive, and in this section
well show you how to go
about buying new apps for
your Fire. When youve got
them on your device, though, its
important to understand how
theyre organised.
Homescreen
The Fire homescreen is dominated
by a large carousel that organises
each of your most recently used
applications, listened-to albums,
viewed lms and read books.
Theyre sorted in reverse
order, with the most recent on
the left and the others stacked
behind it. You can cycle through
them by swiping left and right on

102

whichever media appears at

the top of the pile, regardless of
what it actually is (see below).
You can manually remove any
of these items if you dont
want them to appear on your
homescreen by holding down
your nger on their icon and
selecting Remove from Carousel
on the menu that pops up after a
few moments.
Although you might quit
an application, its usually still
running in the background. If

this is causing you problems

perhaps consuming too many
system resources you can force
it to quit fully by opening the
notication screen and tapping
More | Applications | Installed
Applications. Tap on the name of
the problem application, followed
by Force Stop.
Favourite applications
Previous versions of the Kindle
Fire operating system used to

Below: Your most recently used applications and media are arranged in a scrolling
stack across the centre of the Kindle Fires homescreen, regardless of what they
are. Tap an app to reopen it from here.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Above: If an application has stopped

responding or you want to free up
resources, force it to quit through the
installed applications window.

Above: The Appstore presents a wide range of applications, with highlighted

choices appearing in a large, scrollable carousel at the top of the homescreen.
What you see on this entry screen is just a subset of the complete catalogue of
available applications.

Above: Applications that you use

most often should be added to your
Favourites from the carousel.

present a series of shelves under

the carousel of recently used
applications and media items.
These used to display your
favourite items so that you could
quickly access them, but theyve
since been removed and replaced
with links to content related to
whatever is at the top of the stack,
which you can buy from one of
Amazons online stores.
Favourites are now found in
a dedicated menu, which you can
access by tapping the star icon
in the lower-right corner of the
screen. Tapping this calls up an
overlay that grows as you add
more applications and media to it.
To add a le or applications
to your Favourites area, hold a
nger on its icon in the carousel
and pick Add to Favourites from

the menu that pops up (see bottom

left). Holding down on an icon
thats already in your Favourites
collection instead calls up the
option to remove it.
Deleting applications
Over time, youll nd that
some of the applications youve
downloaded from are no longer
needed, and it makes sense to
delete them so you can reclaim the
space on your device.
This is done from either the
Apps interface (tap Apps on the
menu strip that runs across the
top of the screen) or the carousel.
Hold a nger on the application
you want to remove and select
Remove from Device from the
menu that pops up.

103

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Right: Although the Appstore
homescreen only displays a list of
highlighted applications when you
rst open it, you can gain access to the
complete library either by searching
through the box at the top of the
screen or by using the pop-up menu to
access All Categories.
Holding your nger on a
media item will instead give you a
plain Delete option.
Any apps that shipped as
part of the Kindle Fire operating
system are permanent residents
and cant be deleted from the
Kindle, as they form the devices
core feature set.
Buying applications
While the Kindle, Kindle
Paperwhite and Kindle Keyboard
are sealed units that will only ever
run the applications installed on
them from the point when you
rst unbox them, the Kindle Fire
is a fully edged tablet computer,
backed up by a well-stocked
Appstore.
Although you can view the
Appstore in a regular browser,
you cant actually download
applications to your desktop or
laptop. If you want to install apps
on your Kindle Fire, you should
instead access the Appstore
directly from the homescreen by
tapping Apps | Store.
The front page of the Appstore
shows highlighted applications
chosen by Amazons editors, quick
links to specic categories such
as games and new releases, and

104

lists of bestselling applications.

You can also access menus to
administer your subscriptions and
redeem gift cards.
To gain access to the complete
list of available applications, use
the search box at the top of the

screen to search for particular

keywords or application names
(see opposite page, top) and, when
you nd an application youre
interested in, tap its name in the
listing to open its full details
(see opposite page, bottom).

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Each detailed entry includes a
full description of the application,
plus screen grabs, reviews and
recommendations of other
applications that you might like
based on this purchase. Although
weve highlighted Evernote here,
which is highly regarded, its often
worth investigating what other
applications are recommended
against less well-known options,
as you can often turn up better
alternatives in similar areas in
this manner.
To download an application,
tap its price at the top of the
screen (or tap FREE if it doesnt
have a price). The button will turn
green and its wording will change
to either Buy App or Get App,
depending on whether or not its
charged for.

Right: The easiest way to nd an

application is to use the search box
rather than working your way through
individual categories. This often brings
up related apps alongside the one for
which you specically searched.

Tap this updated button and

the application will be downloaded
automatically and installed on
your Apps shelves, ready for use.
Paying for apps
Even if youre downloading a
free application, youll need
to have up-to-date payment
details registered with Amazon,
so if your credit card has expired
or your account doesnt have
details tied to it youll see an

error box containing a link

that youll need to tap twice to
visit your account and x the
problem.

105

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Buying and renting videos

on Kindle Fire

sk anyone what Amazon

does to make its money,
and the rst thing most
people think of is selling books.
However, for a long time, its also
sold music and DVDs, and its
online movie download and rental
service is one of the best on any
tablet device.
Movie and TV rights
You can watch any video you buy
through Amazon as many times as
you want, whenever you want. You
can also stream it directly from
Amazon by tapping the Watch
Now button on the video store
or from your own online video
library. If youre going to be out
of reach of an internet connection

106

then you can download any

video youve bought to your
Kindle Fire so that you can watch
it on the go without being online.
However, its important to keep
track of where your videos are
being accessed, as you can only
stream them to one device at
a time or download them two
devices simultaneously, so if
youve downloaded them to one
Kindle Fire you have only one
download remaining.
Every Kindle Fire comes with
one months free access to Amazon
Prime, which as well as oering
free delivery on physical products
bought from Amazons store also
gives you free access to a wide
range of lms and TV shows from
its online video service.

You cant download any of

the lms or TV shows to which
you have access through Amazon
Prime; you can only stream them.
If you want to buy a copy so
that you can view it when youre
not online and save bandwidth
by not having to stream it every
time you want to watch it, youll
have to pay the same price as
everyone else.
Buying choices
Its frequently the case that you
might buy a DVD and only watch
it once or twice. Thats not a
problem if youve only paid a
pound or two to buy it second
hand, but if you bought it brand
new and spent considerably more
on it then it can be quite galling.
Often, the only choice will be to
trade it in or sell it second hand at
a considerable discount.
Although the price of online
media sold through Amazons
download store and the equivalent
stores maintained by Apple and
other retailers is usually cheaper
than the physical equivalents on
the high street, it still makes sense
not to buy a movie if you think you
might watch it so infrequently.
It therefore pays to explore the

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

strike a balance between high
quality and low bandwidth.
The former will give you the
best viewing experience, but the
latter will deliver your movies
and TV shows more quickly and
with less of an impact on your
broadband connection. To specify
what settings your Kindle Fire
should use when downloading
media, press the menu button
at the bottom of the store view
and select Settings. Now use the
HD Download Options and SD
Download Options menus (see
below) to specify whether your
Kindle should automatically
download the best quality or opt
for faster downloads, or whether it
should ask for conrmation each
time you initiate a new download.
From here, you can also clear your
video search history, which may
be useful if youve been looking
up lms that you might not want
other people to know youve
shown an interest in.
rental options available on the
video store. Prices vary, depending
on age and video quality.
When you rent a movie, you
must start watching it within 30
days of completing the transaction
or it will expire whether youve
pressed play or not. Once you do
start viewing a video that youve
rented, you must complete it
within 48 hours or, again, it will
expire regardless of whether or
not youve reached the end. You
can either stream the rental live
from the internet or download it
to your device if youre going to

be oine at the time when you

want to watch it. Downloading it
doesnt get around the problem
of expiration; it will still be
unplayable after the deadline.
There are no restrictions on
when you must start or complete
watching any movie or TV show
that youve bought outright, nor
on how many times youre allowed
to view it.
Quality options
If youre going to be downloading
a lot of video then you need to

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Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Downloading, organising
and playing music

long with iTunes,

Amazons music
download service is one
of the most extensive and best
known on the web. Its the perfect
partner for the Kindle Fire,
particularly since the HD and
HDX editions feature some of
the best speakers youll nd in
any tablet device, complete with
Dolby decoding.
Buying music
The music player application
and the music store are directly
linked to one another. Tap Music
in the scrolling top bar on the Fire
homepage to access your existing
tracks, including any stored on
your Cloud Player account, and
then tap the Store link in the
top-right corner of the interface to
enter the shop. Tap Library, in the
same position when you want to
switch back.
As with the video store, the
rst thing youll see is a list of
bestsellers, new releases and
recommendations. Each part of
the homescreen can be scrolled
left and right to view more
content, and each product is
accompanied by a price. You can
buy directly from this homescreen

108

by tapping the price. The price

changes to BUY, and tapping
for a second time downloads the
products to your Kindle Fire
and applies a charge to your
Amazon account.
Thats ne if you tend to only
buy the most popular music, but
the products that you see on the
homepage are only a subsection of
the complete catalogue.
If youre looking for something
specic, use the search box at the

top of the page or, if youd rather

wander through the store, tap the
menu button at the bottom of the
screen and select Browse from the
pop-up options. The store lets you
browse new releases, bestsellers,
and genres.
The rst two speak for
themselves, but the third, genres,
opens up a list of dierent musical
styles, including blues, classical,
folk, jazz pop and so on. So long
as you know into which category

Below: Like the TV and movies store, the MP3 store is home to a far larger
catalogue than the homescreen might suggest. Be sure to check out the full list of
genres to nd the track or album you want.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

your chosen track, album or
artist falls, tapping through these
sections is a great way to nd
other music of a similar style that
you might enjoy.

Right: The Amazon MP3 download

store oers the same range of
tracks through the Kindle Fire
implementation as it does through a
regular browser.

Downloading tracks
Either search for a specic
track, album or artist if you
already know what you want, or
navigate the genres until you reach
a listing.
Tap any album or single to
open its full details. Wherever
possible, Amazon will display
a rating, which is set by other
Amazon customers, and, if any
have been written, a review.
Reading these ratings and
reviews is always helpful when
youre researching a new artist, as
it will aid you in discovering their
best work, but often the best way
to make sure that youre going to
enjoy listening to what you buy is
to audition it, and this is one area
where buying digitally is often
a better experience than buying
physical media.
Once youve opened an album
in the store, youll notice that
each track in the listing has a play
button to its left. Tapping on one
of these plays a 30-second sample
of the song. Theres no charge to
listen to these, as theyre designed
to help you make sure that its the
track you want and something
youd enjoy.
Auditioning a track that
comes as part of an album will
automatically start to play the
next track once the rst comes

to an end. You can either leave

it running this way until youve
auditioned the complete album,
or tap the button to the left of
whichever track is currently
playing to stop the samples.
When youre sure that you
want to download an individual
track, tap the price on the righthand side of the screen next to the
track name. If you want to buy
a complete album, tap the price
to the right of the album artwork
at the top of the screen. In each

instance, the price is swapped

out for a BUY button. Tapping
this again downloads the track or
album and charges your account,
just as it does when you buy
directly from the store homescreen.

Below: You can trial every track in the store by listening to a 30-second sample.
To audition an album, press the play button beside the rst track and it will cycle
through each song until it reaches the end of the listing.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Kindle Fire and Amazons

online Cloud services

lthough the Kindle Fire

HD and HDX already
have fairly generous
storage built in, it wouldnt be
dicult to imagine a day when
you managed to ll them up.
DVDs routinely comprise more
than 4GB of data, and even if you
were to host only a compressed
edition of the lm itself on your
device not all of the extras that
often go with it youd probably
need at least half a gigabyte free. It
wouldnt take many lms, albums,
photos, incoming email messages,
appointments and listings in
your address book for you to start
running short of space on even the
most capacious device.
Fortunately, Amazon has a
logical answer: move as much of
it as possible to the Cloud.
The company has a lot of
experience in handling large
amounts of data online through its
management of one of the worlds
best-known online stores, which
has grown massively beyond its
original manifestation. It was only
natural, then, that it would lend
this knowledge of building online
services into its tablet device, too.
Every Amazon account
includes access to Cloud Player
its music synchronisation service

110

and Cloud Drive, which is used

to manage documents and other
les. You have a fairly generous
amount of space on each, with
5GB for your les and 250 slots
for music tracks on Cloud Player.
If you nd either of these is too
limited for your needs, though,
you can pay to upgrade, with a
range of tiered options giving
you as much as 1TB of online
data storage.
Over the next nine pages,
well walk you through using both
services with Kindle Fire.

STORAGE PRICES
The following fees are payable
annually to maintain your Cloud
Drive account at each given
capacity:
5GB . ..
20GB ..
50GB ..
100GB ..
200GB ..
500GB ..
1,000G

..
..
..
..
..
..
..

.. Free
.. $10
.. $25
.. $50
..$100
..$250
..$500

The key content areas in the Kindle Fire operating system give access both to your
local device and media stored on the Cloud through tabs at the top of the display.
Here were browsing our apps and downloading the Skype application from the
Cloud. Once downloaded, its installed on our Kindle Fire locally so that we dont
need to redownload it every time we want to use it in the future.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Using Amazon Cloud Player to

synchronise your music

s well as 5GB for your

documents and les,
Amazon gives you a
batch of separate space in your
Cloud account to store music
downloaded using its MP3 store,
or uploaded from your computer.
The latter is handled by the
free music uploader utility, which
is an Adobe Air-based application
that works the same way on
both the PC and the Mac. The
instructions that follow therefore
work on both platforms.
Once youve synchronised
your music to the Cloud, you
can play it through the browser,
through a third-party device or
on your Kindle Fire, where the
tracks appear inside the Music
application when you tap on the
Cloud tab.
The free Cloud account
includes 250 slots for you to ll
with your favourite tracks at no
cost. If you want to store more
than this, youll need to upgrade to
the $24.99 annual paid account.
You can access Cloud Player at
www.amazon.com/cloudplayer,
where youll also nd tracks that
have been added automatically to
your account by Amazon, which
originally appeared on physical
CDs you bought through its store.

Walkthrough
Skill level

Intermediate youll need to be happy

handling uploads through a browser

Time required

Around 20 minutes

Equipment

Kindle Fire or Kindle Fire HD, a Mac or

PC with a music collection, and an active
broadband internet connection

(1) Get started by pointing your browser at the online home of Amazons
Cloud Player at www.amazon.com/cloudplayer. Although were setting
up our account so that we can access our music on our Kindle Fire HD,
the whole process starts at the browser end, as we need to establish the
account and start uploading the rst of our tracks.
Unfortunately, this isnt something you can do directly through the
browser. Instead, you need to use Amazons free importer application,
which you can download by clicking the orange button at the centre of
the screen. Its an Air application, so if you havent previously installed
Adobes Air runtime environment it will be downloaded and installed
simultaneously alongside the uploader.

111

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

112

(3) Although youre setting up your account to share music between

your computer and your Kindle, Amazon takes copyright very seriously.
For this reason, its limited the number of devices that you can register to
your Cloud Player account to just 10. This should be enough to use it on
several dierent computers, through dierent browsers and on a handful
of Kindle devices, so that wherever you are and whatever device youre
using, you can still access your synchronised music. Each device needs
to be given a name that would allow you to identify it in the future. Wed
recommend using a descriptive term for your computer, as weve done
here.
(4) Before you can go any further,
Amazon will try and upsell you
from the free account to a paid-for
alternative. You can do this at any
point by clicking the upgrade link
at the top of the browser-based
Cloud Player interface, so you can
safely take the option to select up
to 250 songs for free at this point
to see how you get on with the
service before you decide whether
or not to pay for a commercial
account in the future.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

(5) The uploader immediately

scans your computer for
compatible tracks, checking in
your iTunes library and looking
for Windows Media and MP3 les,
each of which can be played on
the Kindle (protected AAC tracks
downloaded from the iTunes Store
cant be played back on Kindle
Fire). The amount of time this
takes to complete depends on the
size of your music collection.

(6) In the previous image, you could see that the uploader had found 615
compatible tracks on our system. This would exceed the limit on our free
account, so we need to thin them down and choose only the 250 we really
want to access remotely. One option is to use these preset playlists by
checking the boxes beside each one.

(7) However, the playlists are a little inexible.

Weve therefore clicked the Browse for more music
option. This opens up a regular le manager window
(Windows Explorer on the PC and the Finder on the
Mac) through which you can navigate to the folder
containing the music you want to upload to Cloud
Player. Click Select.

(8) You have one last chance to edit your selection

before its uploaded. If youre sure youre happy
with what youve picked, click Import all to start the
process, making sure that your broadband connection
is up and running.

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Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

(9) The uploader has added the folder that we selected to the list of
playlists. Weve expanded it by clicking the + button to its left, then
opened the album itself, called 25, and selected the tracks that we
want to synchronise to our account. We can then click Import selected
to complete the upload process.

114

(10) Rather than upload each of

your tracks from your computer
to the server, Amazon rst checks
how many of them it sells through
its own online store. Any that
it nds will be copied to your
Cloud Player account directly,
both to save time and reduce the
amount of data passing over your
broadband connection, which
helps you avoid being liable for
any excess usage fees.
(11) You dont need to wait for the
uploader to nish sending your
les to the server before you start
playing them through the browser.
Leave the uploader running in the
background and return to your
browser (if you previously closed
it, point it at the Cloud Player site
again) and youll see whichever
tracks have already been uploaded
in place in the listings window.
Hover over any track name
and an icon will appear to the
left that, when clicked, starts the
song playing. You can also use the
transport controls to skip forwards
and backwards, and loop or shue
your tracks.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

(12) Your tracks can be accessed

through the Cloud tab in the
Kindle Fires Music application.
Again, you need to authorise your
device before you can see the
music youve uploaded to your
Cloud Player account.
Keep in mind that this uses
up another of your 10 allocated
devices, so even if youve only
uploaded some music from your
computer and then authorised
your Kindle Fire to play it back
youve used 20% of your licences.
Authorisation only takes a few
seconds, so if you arent getting
anywhere, make sure your wireless
network connection is active and
you have a good, strong signal to
minimise the amount of error on
the data transfer.

(13) You can organise your music

collection into a series of playlists
along whichever lines makes most
sense to you. At the moment,
your newly uploaded tracks will
be organised in a playlist called
Recently Added to Device.
Tap this playlist to view the
tracks and then decide what you
want to do with them. If you want
to add them all to your Kindle
Fire, tap the Download all button
to save a copy of each one to your
Kindle Fires local storage.
To download individual tracks,
open the playlist with a single
tap and then hold your nger
on the track you want and select
Download Song. The same menu
lets you buy that artists other
tracks from Amazon.

(14) Tapping a song rather than

holding down on it opens it in the
Kindle music player. It will take a
little while for the track to stream
from the servers, and again the
exact length of time will depend
on the quality of the song and the
speed of your network connection.
If, having lived with the
limited service for a couple of
days, you nd that youre happy
managing your music this way you
might want to upgrade to a paid
account so that you dont have to
keep removing tracks to maintain
some spare capacity.
This is easy to do through the
www.amazon.com/cloudplayer
website, where you only need click
the upgrade link to gain access to a
250,000-track drive.

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Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Using Amazon Cloud Drive

loud Drive is Amazons

online le storage facility.
It allows anyone with an
Amazon account to keep up to
5GB of les online, which can
then be accessed from any
web-connected computer and, of
course, the Kindle Fire.
If you have an Amazon
account, you already have a Cloud
Drive account; to sign in, point a
regular desktop or laptop browser
at www.amazon.com/clouddrive
and use your regular Amazon
login credentials.

Amazon allows access to the

Cloud Drive from up to eight
dierent devices. However, as it
uses cookies to track some of these
devices, such as browsers, you
may nd youve used up one of
your allocation simply by clearing
out your cookie cache to free
yourself from third-party tracking
data. If you use the service with
a regular browser, you should
therefore be careful to only clear
out your cookies selectively, rather
than wiping the whole directory to
preserve the Cloud Drive entry.

Below: There are two sides to Cloud Drive. On the one hand, you have the parts
that appear on your Kindle in various applications and in the main content bar;
on the other, you have a comprehensive web interface.

116

Visiting your Cloud Drive

from dierent browsers on the
same computer will also use
up more of your Cloud Drive
device allocations, so if possible
always use just one browser on
each machine.
Changing your plan
Although 5GB is a generous
amount of space for Amazon to
give away for free particularly
considering how many people are
eligible for the service its still
frighteningly easy to ll it quickly
in these days of multi-gigabyte
video les, oce documents
and backups.
Amazon therefore makes it
easy to buy additional storage,
with six tiered plans available to
anyone who wants to build on the
bundled 5GB.
This option isnt currently
available in all territories
(see boxout on opposite page),
but in those where it is available
the additional storage will be
available immediately.
Unless you cancel the plan or
downgrade it at a later date, it will
be renewed at your new level at
the start of your next billing cycle,
so its important to keep an eye on

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

COUNTRIES INELIGIBLE FOR DRIVE UPGRADES

Austria
Belgium
Bulgaria
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France

Germany
Greece
Hungary
Ireland
Italy
Latvia
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Malta

your anniversary dates to avoid

any unexpected bills.
Should you later decide
to downgrade your plan, the
additional storage will remain
available until your billing
cycle renewal, at which point
it will be removed without
incurring any additional
charge. Youll be able to continue
using the extra space until the
date on which the cancellation
takes eect.
Deleting les
When you delete a le, it remains
in place, but is moved to the
trash. It therefore continues to
occupy space on your Cloud Drive.
You can see how much space its
using by pointing your browser at
www.amazon.com/clouddrive/
manage/ (see right).
To clear out these items and
thus increase your available
storage space without buying
extra capacity, return to your
Cloud Drive homepage,
click Deleted Items in the

Netherlands
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden

left-hand margin and then

click Permanently Delete All
to remove any les residing in
that folder.
Cloud Drive, folders
and dierent le types

Photos and Videos. You can add

further folders as and when you
need them.
By sticking with Amazons
predened folders youll easily be
able to work with your media on
your Kindle Fire.
For example, dropping photos
into the Pictures folder through
your browser will make them
appear in the Photos application
on your Kindle, from which you
can access them to use in other
applications or share with friends
and family. Further, putting word
processed les in the Documents
folder will make them available to
applications that can access the
My Documents folder remotely
over the internet.
Documents

Cloud Drive isnt simply a bucket

into which you should throw les
without some consideration of
where to put them. When you rst
visit the Cloud Drive web interface
(see opposite page), youll notice
that it contains four folders
Archived Music, Documents,

However, its important note that

theres a clear distinction between
those documents that you upload
manually this way and the ones
that you email to your device
using the @kindle.com email
address specied on your Kindle

Below: The Cloud Drive management pages let you see at a glance how much space
youre using and how many tracks youve uploaded to your online Cloud Player.

117

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Dashboard in the same way as you

would for an e-ink device.
Any documents dispatched by
email are stored in your Kindle
Library. This is dierent to the
Cloud Drive, being the place
where Amazon stores a catalogue
of books youve previously
downloaded to any of your devices
or Kindle applications using
that account.
Since your @kindle.com
addresses are each tied to a specic
device, you can send documents
straight to the homescreen of an
e-ink Kindle or the relevant folder
on the Kindle Fire.
To nd the address of your
Kindle Fire without using the
browser, open the notication
pane and tap More, followed by
My Account.

118

Above: By uploading images to the Pictures folder of our Cloud Drive account
through a regular web browser, we can then open the Photos application on the
Kindle Fire and nd them by tapping the Cloud tab. Going onto tap any of the
images opens them full screen, or we can use the envelope icon to send them
directly using the Kindles built-in email client.

Below: You can force your Kindle to synchronise its local data with the les stored
on Amazons servers by opening the notications screen (rest your nger on the
clock at the top of the screen and drag down) and tapping the Sync button on the
general toolbar.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Cloud Drive application

If working through the browser
in this way sounds too much
like hard work then dont fret:
Amazon has also produced a small
application for both Windows and
Mac platforms that allows you to
upload les directly (see right).
Leaving this on your computer
desktop means it will always be to

Above: The free Cloud Drive app lets

you simply drag and drop les onto an
active window to send them to your
online storage space.

Below: You can also email documents to the Cloud using the Kindle email address
assigned to your Fire. Any document with a tick beside its name, as with the rst
and third in the listing below, has been downloaded to the local Kindle and so will
also be found on the Device tab.

hand when you need to transfer

data to your device.
The Cloud Drive application
lets you upload complete folders,
which transfer from your
computer to your online storage
space in the background, saving
you from keeping a browser
window open throughout the
duration of the process.
On the Mac, it adds an Amazon
Cloud Drive icon to the menu bar,
too, so if you dont even want to
open the uploader window you
can simply drag les there from
the regular le system to start the
transfer right away. You can also
set it to synchronise with iPhoto
to transfer your photo library to
your Kindle in the same way Photo
Stream synchronised images with
connected iPads and iPhones.
Files uploaded this way arent
led into the appropriate folders
the way they would be if you
dragged them manually through a
browser, but are, instead, sent to a
generic Uploads folder, so it pays
to spend some time at a later point
organising them more logically.

119

Kindle
xer

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Kindle troubleshooter
Registration and hardware issues
I bought my Kindle second hand
and its still registered to the
previous user. Help!
You need to deregister the Kindle
and tie it to your account instead
(although the person who sold it
should have done this for you, for
their own security).
On an e-ink-based Kindle,
navigate through the menu to
select Settings | Deregister. Kindle
Fire users, tap Settings | More |
My Account | Deregister.
If you bought someone a
Kindle as a present, it will be
registered to your account unless
you marked it as a gift. Youll need
to deregister it yourself before they
can start using it. Fortunately, you
can do this without unwrapping
their present by logging into your
Amazon account through a regular
Windows or Mac browser and
selecting Kindle | Manage Your
Kindle in the left-hand margin.

122

The next page will display a

Deregister link beside the
gifted Kindle.
Youll now nd the Register
option in the same position.
Follow the instructions on p22 to
register the Kindle through the
recipients Amazon account in
a browser.
Ive forgotten my e-ink Kindles
password.
If youve set a password to stop
unauthorised users viewing your
downloads, its very important
that you dont forget it, as the only
way to get back into your device if
you do is to reset the whole thing.
As a nal resort, switch on your
Kindle in the usual way and enter
resetmykindle in the password
box. This will get you back in, but
only after deleting all of
your content.
Fortunately, all of your
content will still be backed up on
Amazons server, so youll be able

to download it again from there

and, assuming youd kept Wi-Fi
turned on while you were reading,
you should nd yourself back at
the most recent page of your active
book, with all of your highlights
and notes in place.
How do I switch o my Kindle?
So long as youve switched o
their Wi-Fi and 3G features,
regular e-ink (ie non-Fire) Kindles
dont use any more power when
in standby than they do when
youre reading a page; power is
consumed when you turn pages
and it has to change the e-ink
composition. You can therefore
leave your Kindle turned on the
whole time and it will make no
dierence to the remaining charge
(although, if you have a Kindle
Paperwhite, make sure that the
light is turned o).
However, if youre planning
on taking a long journey and
want to switch it o entirely while
youre away then holding the
power switch for 20 seconds will
shut it down entirely, blanking
the screen so that not even the
screensavers show.
Get into the habit of turning
o a Kindle Fire when not in use,
as it will continue to use power.

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

My Kindle wont switch on.
Most likely this is happening
because your battery needs
recharging. If your Kindle shipped
with a plug, plug it in and leave it
to charge overnight. If you dont
have a plug, connect it to the USB
port of a switched-on computer
and again leave it for several hours
to top up the battery.
Unplug the Kindle and hold
the power switch for several
seconds. If it still doesnt work,
contact Amazon. Your Kindle is
covered by a 12-month limited
warranty.
How do I change the name of
my Kindle?
Every Kindle registered to your
account has its own unique name,
which is used in the menu of
destination options from which
you can choose when sending
books to your device.
Amazon picks this name for
you when you rst register your
Kindle, but if it makes more
sense for you to use something
else, you can change it. Log into

Below: Your existing Kindle content

can be easily downloaded to an e-ink
or Fire-based Kindle.

your Amazon account using a

regular browser and click Kindle
| Manage My Kindle | Manage
Your Devices. Now click Edit
beside the name of the Kindle you
want to rename and type in the
new details (see opposite page).
How do I update my Kindle
software?
From time to time, Amazon
updates the operating system for
its Kindles both current models
and legacy devices. These updates
patch security issues, improve
performance and sometimes add
new features. You can nd the
latest updates for your Kindle,
including details of how you go
about implementing them, at
amzn.to/suutAb.
My Kindle OS has somehow been
set to a foreign language. How do
I change it back?

The most recent batch of Kindles

support German, Spanish,
French, Italian, Portugese and two
versions of English (British and
American). If youve accidentally
changed your language setting
on an e-ink Kindle and so dont
understand the menus to change
it back, press Menu, navigate to
the second screen and then choose
the rst menu option to pick an
alternative (see left).
Transferring and syncing content
How do I copy my existing Kindle
content to my new Kindle?
Theres no need to copy everything
over when you buy a new Kindle,
as Amazon stores all of your
purchases in your library.
To enjoy the same books on
your new Kindle as you did on
your old one, make sure your WiFi connection is active and select

123

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Menu | View Archived Items to
call up a list of your books (see
previous page). You can then
retrieve any you want on your
new device and theyll appear on
the homescreen.
On the Kindle Fire, simply
open the Books application and
tap the Cloud button to view your
past purchases. Each one will be
accompanied by a down-pointing
arrow. Tap it to load the book onto
your new Kindle.
How to I change my Kindle email
address?
This is the address to which you
email documents that you want
to transfer to your Kindle without
dragging them across over USB.
Amazon sets one for you when you
rst register your Kindle, with the
extension @kindle.com.
To choose a more memorable
address, log into your Amazon
account using a browser and click
Kindle | Manage My Kindle |
Personal Document Settings.
From this screen, click Edit
beside the address of the Kindle
for which you want to change the
address and enter a new username
in front of the @ symbol. You
cant change the kindle.com part
of the address.
While here, you should
also check the list of authorised
addresses allowed to send content
to your Kindles to ensure
that youve removed any old,
out-of-date entries and included
any address from which youd
conceivably send content to
your device.

124

Above: If youre having trouble emailing les to your Kindle, log into your account
and check your Personal Documents folder. If your le doesnt appear there, ask
your ISP whether its experiencing any mail connection problems.
Ive emailed a le to my Kindle
but its still not appeared. Where
is it?
First, check that your Kindle has
an active network connection and
that the address from which you
sent the le is authorised to access
the device (see above). If neither
of these is at issue, force it to
check for new content by pressing
the Menu button and selecting
Sync & Check for Items.
If this doesnt bring down your
le, you need to make sure that
you sent a le type supported by
your Kindle. See the box entitled
Supported File Types, on the
opposite page.
Finally, check the size of your
le. Amazon has wisely placed
restrictions on the maximum le
size that can be transferred to
your device in this way. No le
can consume more than 50MB
of disk space, and you mustnt

attach more than 25 documents

to a single email, nor address that
email to more than 15 dierent
@kindle.com or @free.kindle.com
addresses.
Finally, log into your
Amazon account using a regular
browser and navigate to Kindle |
Manage Your Kindle | Personal
Documents to see whether your
le has even been received at
your Kindle address. If not, the
problem is likely to be at your
local end of the transfer. Check for
mail problems with your Internet
Service Provider (ISP).
Im reading the same book on two
devices, or a Kindle and a Kindle
app, and the pages are out of sync
on each device. Why?
Check that both of your
devices have an active network
connection and can connect to
the internet. They need this to

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

FILE TYPES
The Kindle supports the
following le types when
transferring documents and
les by email:

Word DOC and DOCX

HTML

Rich Text Format

JPEG

GIF

PNG

Bitmap (BMP)

PDF

Kindle format (AdW)

Mobipocket (MOBI)
When transferring les over
USB, it enjoys greater le type
support, adding the following
to those detailed above:

AAC audio

AAC+ audio

Enhanced AAC+ audio

3GP audio

Ogg Vorbis

Midi

MP3

Wave format (WAV)

H.263 video

H264 AVC video

MPEG4

VP8 video

send their current page position,

along with any annotations and
bookmarks, back to Amazon
using Whispersync. In the other
direction, they also use it to
download any page positions
set when reading on companion
devices.

Above: If your media are failing to show up on your Kindle Fire, it could be that
your device isnt seeing the most recent view of the Amazon Cloud. Force it to
refresh the view through the Music menu.
If two people are reading the
same book bought through the
same Amazon account but on
dierent devices, be sure to switch
o Wi-Fi to avoid each reader
interfering with their partners
position in their own copy of
the book.
Bear in mind, also, that
keeping your Wi-Fi or 3G
connection active will drain your
battery more quickly, so if youre
reading your book on only one
device it makes sense to keep it
switched o unless you specically
need internet access.
Music
Ive bought some MP3s from
Amazon and they arent showing
up on my Kindle Fire.
Tracks youve recently purchased
can take up to 10 minutes to show
up on the Cloud tab of the Music
app as theyre being synced on
the server in the background. You
can hurry along the process in a

similar way to forcing a Kindle to

check for incoming documents
by tapping Music | Menu (the
line-lled rectangle at the bottom
of the screen) | Settings | Refresh
Cloud Drive (see above).
When I connect my Kindle to my
computer, I cant see a music
folder in its memory.
Not all Kindles have a music
folder by default, but thats not
a problem as you can create one
yourself using your Mac or PC and
from there drag content into it.
Note, however, that not all
Kindles have music and audio
playback features. The entry-level
Kindle, for example, cant play
audio, as it doesnt have speakers
or a headphone socket, even if
you bought the non-subsidised
version without the special oers.
It therefore doesnt support
any audio le types, so creating
and populating a music folder
would be a waste of your limited
storage.

125

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Glossary
The Kindle may have been
designed with ease of use in
mind, but it still lives in a world
of acronyms and jargon. To really
get along with your e-reader, there
are a few words and phrases you
ought to know, starting with these.
3G Third-generation mobile
phone network technology oering
speeds high enough to enable
rudimentary video conferencing
and mobile television streaming.
Its widely available across much
of Europe, but was rst introduced
for public consumption in Japan
in 2001. Its used on some regular
Kindle devices for buying content.

Above: The Amazon Appstore is the place to turn to download apps for use on the
Kindle Fire, Fire HD and Fire HDX, each of which is built on top of the Android OS.

802.11a/b/g/n Wireless
communications standards.
Compatible devices such as the
Kindle, Kindle Paperwhite and
Kindle Fire (see left) can use these
standards to connect to your home
network to download books, music
and apps.
Amazon Silk Browser on the
Kindle Fire that splits the work
involved in requesting and
Left: The Kindle and Kindle Fire conform
to common wireless standards, so its
easy to get them online and download
your rst batch of content.

126

assembling the various parts of

a web page between the tablet
device and Amazons cloud
computing network. As much
of the content of the pages you
view will be cached on the cloud
network, as theyve also been
requested by other users, you
should experience a signicantly
faster browsing experience overall.
Appstore Online shop
distributing free and charged-for
applications for use on a portable
device such as the Kindle Fire,
giving users an easy to nd,
trusted outlet (see above).

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

Above: Amazons Cloud Drive lets you store your content online and retrieve it through your Kindle Fire. Working this way
helps you to preserve the valuable space on your device without paying for a higher capacity Kindle.
Bitrate Means of expressing
the number of audio samples
processed in a set period of time,
usually a second.
Cloud Centralised computing
network that is most often used as
a virtual storage device. Amazons
specic cloud infrastructure
performs two functions: its a
place to store your book, music
and video purchases so that they
dont always need to be kept
on your device, and its a place
where some of the Kindle Fires
processing functions are carried
out to take the strain o your
tablet device.
Compression When images on
a website or music on a Kindle
are made smaller so that they
either download more quickly or
take up less space in the devices
memory theyre said to have

been compressed. Compression

involves selectively removing parts
of the le that are less easily seen
or heard by the human eye and ear
and simplifying complex parts.
Digital Rights Management
(DRM). Additional encoded data
added to a digitised piece of audio,
video or a book that controls the
way in which it will work, usually
preventing it from being shared
among several users.

source, such as a sound or an

image, and translating it into a
digital format. Although les can
be encoded with no loss of quality,
the process usually also involves
compression to reduce le sizes.
To some degree, ebooks can also
be said to have been encoded even
though theyre created using the

e-ink Screen technology used in

all Kindles except for the Kindle
Fire. Uses reected light rather
than being backlit and so is often
easier to read in bright light than
an LCD equivalent (see right).
Currently monochrome, but colour
editions are being developed.
Encoding The process of
capturing an analogue data

127

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

publishers original source les
rather than being converted from
their paper-based equivalents.
Firewall Hardware or software
device that controls the ow of
data in and out of a machine or
network. It can also help to rebu
attacks from hackers. Frequently
used by network administrators
to ensure that local users dont
access external services that could
compromise network integrity.
Firmware Software built into
a device such as the Kindle that
controls all of its core functions.
The closest equivalent in a regular
computer is the operating system
that hosts the various applications
it runs. Windows, Linux and
Mac OS X are three examples.
Amazon has released the
source code for the Kindles
operating system so that it can be
downloaded and examined by the
general public, and also delivers
periodic updates that add new
features to its devices.
GB Gigabyte. One billion bytes,
and a means of measuring the
capacity of a device. A byte is
made up of eight bits, and a bit is
equivalent to a single character,
such as a, b, c, 4, 5, 6 and so on.
As digital les are encoded using
the characters 0 and 1, each
digit that makes up part of its
encoding will represent one bit,
every eight characters will make
one byte, every 1,024 bytes will
equal a kilobyte and every million
kilobytes will equate to a gigabyte.

128

Homescreen As used within this

guide, the term used to describe
the screen within the various
Kindle interfaces that displays
the icons for the various installed
applications (on Kindle Fire)
or the books and other media
content that youve downloaded
(e-ink-based Kindles).
HTML Acronym for HyperText
Mark-up Language, the code
used to program web pages. Its
a plain-English language code,
which uses simple tags such
as <b> to denote bold, <i> to
instigate italics and <p> to mark
the start of a paragraph. Several
applications, such as Adobe
Dreamweaver, greatly simplify
the task of writing web pages by
allowing programmers to work
in a desktop publishing-style
layout mode, rather than having
to manipulate raw code. HTML is
often supplemented by attached
styling information in the form
of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Browsers combine the two to

construct a page.
IMAP Internet Message Access
Protocol. A server-based means
of hosting incoming and
outgoing email messages so
that they can be accessed using
a remote client such as the
email application on the Kindle
Fire. The primary benet of
working in this way is that the
messages will always be accessible
from any device, anywhere and at
any time.
Kilobits per second (Kbps) A
measurement of the number of
audio samples that go to make
each second of music in a digitally
encoded track. The higher this
number, the smoother the sound
wave will be and the truer to the
original it will sound.
MP3 Shorthand term used to
denote audio tracks encoded using
the Motion Picture Expert Group

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

codec 2 (Mpeg-2), level three.
Arguably the most common audio
format found on the web thanks
to its widespread use by portable
music players.
OS X Operating system developed
by Apple, a variant of which is
used inside the iPhone and later
versions of the iPod under the
name iOS. It allows Kindle users
to connect their e-reader using
USB, at which point it will appear
as though it was a connected hard
drive onto which they can drag
downloaded content.
Playlist Menu of audio tracks or
video les waiting to be played.
Podcast Pre-recorded audio or
video programme distributed
over the internet and optimised
for playback on portable devices
such as the Kindle Fire. Initially
considered to be solely of interest
to bedroom broadcasters, podcasts
have since been embraced by
newspaper publishers such as
The Guardian and The Times in
the UK, as well as international
broadcasters like the BBC, which
makes much of its spoken content
from both Radio 4 and its
popular networks available in
the format.
Pop3 Post Oce Protocol 3. This
is the predominant technology
for email delivery used by most
consumer-level internet service
providers. All good email clients,
including the one in the Kindle
Fire, can use this to receive email.

THE KINDLE FAMILY

Confused by the various names in the Kindle family? Over the years,
Amazon has changed the names of its devices, with dierent models
sporting dierent abilities.
Kindle This is the cheapest entry-level device. It doesnt have a
touch-sensitive interface, so all navigation is conducted with the use
of forward and back buttons to the left and right, and a multiway
button at the bottom of the interface that steps through menu options
and jumps directly to the opening pages of chapters. Theres no
backlight, either, so while its great in sunlight its less easy to read in
dim surroundings.
Kindle DX e-ink-based Kindle with a 9.7in display sold in the US, but
which never made it across to the UK. No backlight or touchscreen, but
it does include a keyboard and, thanks to the large screen, is well suited
to more complex layouts and reading Acrobat PDF documents.
Kindle Paperwhite The top-end e-ink-based device, with a
touch-sensitive display. This replaced the Kindle Touch. Uses an
onscreen keyboard and has a backlight so you can read your book in
the dark. Also includes innovative features like X-Ray and extended
lookup options for dening words and cross-referencing throughout
the book.
Kindle Keyboard Sadly retired Kindle that was once called the Kindle
Third Generation. It was the last pocketable device to feature a physical
keyboard, with this feature now being fullled by onscreen equivalents.
The display wasnt touch-sensitive or backlit. Still available second hand
on auction sites, and well worth hunting down if you can nd one.
Kindle Fire Entry-level colour LCD-based device built on top of the
Android operating system, which allows you to use it for watching
movies, browsing the web, listening to music and so on. Comes with
a range of pre-installed applications for handling email on the move,
with the option to install further applications of your choice from the
Amazon Appstore.
Kindle Fire HD and Fire HDX Higher resolution editions of the Kindle
Fire with options for 7in and 8.9in displays, higher capacities and
cellular connection features so you can get online when youre away
from a wireless network.

129

Ultimate Guide to Kindle 3

WAV Short for WAVeform
audio format. A format used to
store audio developed initially by
Microsoft and IBM. It remains
more popular on Windows
computers than Macs and can be
played back by some Kindles.

Push email The technology by

which emails are sent from the
central server that holds them to
a client device, such as a mobile
phone or BlackBerry, without
the owner having to manually
instigate a retrieval for their
messages.
Rip A term used to described
the act of extracting audio from
a CD for digital playback from a
computer or portable device.
SMTP Simple Mail Transfer
Protocol. This is the most common
almost default means of
sending email from any client that
works on the basis of composing
messages using a standalone client
rather than web-based.

Sync Short for synchronise.

The means of swapping data and
purchases between the Kindle and
Amazons network. Traditionally
performed using Amazons
Whispersync technology, although
you can also transfer content
manually by connecting your
Kindle to your computer and
dragging it across. If your Kindle
isnt immediately seeing content
that youve sent to it remotely, you
can force a synchronisation from
the menus (see below left).
USB Universal Serial Bus. A
socket, plug and cable system
that allows almost any peripheral
to be connected to a Mac or
PC, including printers, mice,
keyboards and so on. The Kindle
also uses USB as a means of
exchanging media content with
a computer when connected
physically (see above) and, now
that Amazon isnt shipping plugs
with most of its Kindle products,
also a connection through which
you can charge your device.
VBR Variable Bit Rate. A means
of varying the eective audio
resolution of a sound le, such as
a song, based on the complexity of
its contents.

130

Whispersync Amazons name

for the process of keeping each
of the books youre reading
updated with your current page,
bookmarks, notes and so on,
across multiple devices or Kindle
reading applications.
Wi-Fi or Wi Once colloquial,
but now a generally accepted
term for wireless networking. It
embodies several standards, of
which the four most common are
802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g and
802.11n. The a and g variants
can each achieve a maximum data
throughput of 54 megabits per
second, while 802.11b runs at 11
megabits per second. 802.11n, the
fastest standard at 248 megabits
per second, is as yet unratied,
although draft standards have
allowed it to be built into many
wireless devices already, giving it
good overall industry support. The
Kindle uses 802.11b, g and n for
the broad compatibility.
Wireless Access Point
Hardware device that connects
to your network or broadband
connection and replicates the
features of wired networks in a
wireless form to provide network
access to Wi-Fi devices such as
the Kindle.

Kindle
Ultimate Guide to the New Kindle Family

Both Paperwhite and Fire HDX range covered in our comprehensive buyer's guide
From hidden features to publishing your own ebook, we include a wealth of helpful tutorials
Amazons latest online resources for Kindle explored, including Magazine, Cloud, Music and Movie services
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