How to Upload My Own Books to Kindle

If you have an ebook reader chances are it's a Kindle. Today we're taking a wait at ways you can become more from your Kindle using built-in tools, experimental features, and third-party software. Read on to supercharge your Kindle experience.

Yous might have bought your Kindle, used information technology to buy some titles from the Kindle store, and idea that'south all at that place was to Kindle ownership. Millions of Kindle owners are perfectly happy with that organisation but you tin can squeeze much more life and enjoyment out of your Kindle by digging into the device, employing third party hacks and software bundles, and more.

Jailbreak Your Kindle for Custom Screensavers

Jailbreaking your Kindle doesn't give you lot quite the range of tools and abilities that jailbreaking an iPhone does but information technology'southward still a pretty neat play a joke on to really customize your Kindle to fit your personality. On my Kindle, for example, I replaced the default screensaver with a big drove of pinup paintings by American pinup artist Gil Elvgren (pack available here) and on my wife's Kindle I replaced it with a drove of Wonder Woman art (pack available here).

You tin can follow our guide to jailbreaking your Kindle here (and keep up on the world of Kindle jailbreaking here for the latest and greatest hacks). Creating your ain screensaver images is piece of cake; we detail how in our guide. If you'd prefer to custom without the work of cropping and scaling your ain images make certain to cheque out some of the online Kindle wallpaper depots like this Kindle wallpaper Tumblr and KindleScreensavers, also equally searching Google for Kindle-friendly images like so.

Format Not-Kindle Shop Books for the Kindle

When you purchase books on Amazon.com or from your Kindle they get in neatly formatted and gear up to rock on your Kindle. If you take ebooks that you lot have purchased from other sources like PDF, ePUB, LIT, or other formats yous likely want to read them on your Kindle. The Kindle can natively handle the post-obit file types: MOBI, PRC, TXT, and TPZ. The Kindle, every bit of firmware two.3, also supports PDF files. PDF files aren't normally formatted for ebook readers (the margins are huge, the fonts don't scale, etc.) so fifty-fifty though yous can load them on your Kindle yous'll probable desire to convert them.

Fortunately Calibre, a third party and open source ebook manager, is amazingly robust and perfect for managing an ebook library of any size and with practically any device. We've shown you before how to convert PDF to ePUB and how to convert Give-and-take docs to ePUB using Calibre. You can easily swap out the ePUB office for MOBI and convert to your eye's content for your Kindle. If you're curious which formats are the best for conversion, they lay it out in their extensive FAQ here.

Formatting Manga for Crisp and Like shooting fish in a barrel Reading on Your Kindle

Perhaps your trouble isn't that you want to convert 1 book format to another volume format merely that yous want to read moving-picture show-based literature on your Kindle. Many Manga fans notice, for instance, that the Kindle is roughly the size of a Manga merchandise paperback and that the grayscale screen is a great match for the grayscale of Manga artwork.

The match seemed like such a perfect fit that one Manga fan even created a plan called Mangle to help Manga (and comic book) fans optimize their collections for reading on the Kindle. You can check out our guide to using the application here. Even if y'all're not a Manga fan, Mangle is an awesome awarding for optimizing your Kindle screensavers. When we ran it through our collection information technology shaved the size by 40+% without any noticeable loss in quality.

Score Thousands of Costless Books Online

This tip isn't Kindle-specific, only it'southward worth mentioning hither. Although the Kindle Store has a big free and discounted books section (if you haven't checked it out all the same and you're a Kindle owner, you really should) there are many other places to observe gratis books online—and you lot won't even accept to hoist the Jolly Roger to get them.

Catalogs of public works, book giveaways, and more all contribute to the pool of free books bachelor. Check out our guide to finding free books beyond the spider web hither.

Access Your Ebook Collection Anywhere in the World

The Kindle's 4GB storage chapters is more than enough to hold thousands of books but if you're a dedicated bibliophile you never desire to be without your books, right?

Never find yourself settled into a lounge chair at your favorite resort simply to detect you forgot to copy the books over from your computer to your Kindle. Calibre, the awesome ebook management application we promoted earlier in this guide to help with book conversions, also has a sweet media server built in that will assistance you link your Kindle (or other ebook reader) to your ebook library wherever you may roam. You can read all about configuring the media server here.

Convert Spider web Articles for Your Kindle

Reading books on the Kindle is bully but there'due south no need to limit yourself. Yous can both scan the web and read web-based articles from your Kindle and, from the comfort of your computer, ship articles wirelessly and neatly converted to your Kindle.

The offset method requires no outside effort. Navigate on your Kindle to Bill of fare –> Experimental –> Web Browser and then punch in the address of a site you want to read articles on. When y'all find an article you want to read then all you lot have to do is hit the Enter key and navigate the zoom pane that appears to highlight the body of the article (instead of the ads, sidebars, and such). Printing the Menu button once again and select Article Mode. The Kindle volition zoom and reformat the text for y'all. It's not perfect but it works pretty darn well almost of the fourth dimension. Y'all can see the results in the screenshot above.

Alternatively you tin have advantage of the Kindle delivery service. Your Kindle has a unique email address that y'all can email files to. These files are so converted and wirelessly transferred to your Kindle. You can read about how to identify and use your Kindle e-mail accost hither. Once you know what your Kindle electronic mail accost is you tin can use the awesome Kindlability bookmark to cypher articles correct from your desktop browser to your Kindle.

Update Social Media Accounts from Your Kindle

Although nobody is going to toss aside their smartphone to start browsing Facebook from their Kindle, you lot can push social media updates from your Kindle to both Twitter and Facebook. The entire setup is designed to make it like shooting fish in a barrel to share snippets of text from books you are reading. If you're interested in playing around with it navigate to Menu –> Settings –> Social Networks –> Manage. At that place y'all can qualify your Kindle to access both your Twitter and Facebook account. The sharing is adequately primitive and would, ideally, share a tiny URL to the book y'all're talking about, but for at present yous're limited to sharing quotes from the book that can be appended with a custom message.

Play Games on Your Kindle

Your Kindle is no smartphone and there'south no take chances at all you'll be convinced of that past the quality of the games on it. None the less there are some niggling Easter Egg games hidden on the Kindle. From the main screen you can press ALT+SHIFT+G to load up Mine Sweeper. In one case y'all've loaded up Mine Sweeper y'all can printing the G key to load up a copy of GoMoku. You're not going to become confused and think y'all're playing Angry Birds but if you're taking a break from reading a dense novel it's a nice little distraction.

Have a Kindle tip, fox, or hack to share that we didn't cover here? Have a collection of tricks to share for other pop ebook readers? Sound off in the comments and share your wisdom with your fellow readers.