Amazon Kindle How-To Series – Convert Free eBooks to Kindle Books

While the Kindle Wireless Reading Device allows you to take literally hundreds of eBooks, newspapers, and magazines with you wherever you go, your Kindle is quite picky about the types of documents it will allow you to read. Free eBooks, articles, white papers, and other documents that you might want to read on your Kindle are everywhere on the Internet. The problem is that they are not in a “Kindle compatible” format.

The Kindle “naively” supports the following document formats:

Kindle Documents (.azw)

Text documents (.txt)

Mobi Reader documents (.mobi or .prc)

But, if you have a document that you want to read on your Kindle that is in another format, for example, a free eBook that is an Adobe Reader file (.pdf) or a Microsoft Word file (.doc), then you have to convert it to the appropriate format for use on your Kindle. Fortunately this is not something that is difficult to do.

Amazon has a service for which they charge a nominal amount that allows you to convert documents such as .pdf (Adobe Acrobat Reader) files to Kindle files. To do this, you must first have an active Kindle email address. You can make sure you’re set up with a Kindle email address by visiting the “Manage Your Kindle” section of the Amazon website. Typically, your Kindle email address will be “[email protected].”

1. Make sure the document you want to convert is in one of the following formats

Microsoft Word (.doc)

HTML (.html)

Adobe Acrobat Reader (.pdf)

2. Verify that the file is not “protected”. This can happen with eBooks you have purchased with DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions. You may also have documents that include passwords or other means of restricting access. You will not be able to convert these files.

3. Create an email to your Kindle email address and attach the file you want to read on your Kindle.

4. Send the email: Amazon will convert the document and send it to your Kindle over the wireless connection.

5. The cost of this service is $.10 (ten cents) per document.

If you’d like to convert your document for free, or you’re in an area where you can’t access Kindle wireless service, you can do so with a slight change to the steps above.

Instead of sending the email with the attached document to your Kindle email address, send it to “[email protected]”. Amazon will convert the document and return it to the originating email address. When you receive the email from Amazon, you can transfer the document to your Kindle using the USB cable connected to your computer.

It’s as simple as that!

Some important things to remember. First, as stated above, if the files you want to convert have some kind of DRM (Digital Rights Management) restriction, then the file will not be converted. Also, this is an “experimental” service for Amazon. Documents with complex formats or certain .pdf files may not convert as expected. While this may not stop you from reading the document, it will make it a bit more difficult to navigate through your eBook.

Congratulations! Now you know how you can quickly convert Microsoft Word, HTML, and Adobe Acrobat Reader eBooks to Kindle-compatible eBooks. This process can help you add a lot of great content to your Kindle wireless reading device.