Merry Christmas! Just unwrapped an Amazon Kindle 4? Welcome to the world of digital bookwormery! The new eReading dream machine may have ditched the physical keyboard found on its predecessor, but it’s still got some real tricks up its sleeve.
Tips for the last generation Kindle
Here’s our list of the best 10 that’ll let you crank that inconspicuous-looking Kindle up to 11.
1. Play games
Head to www.amazon.com/free-games-for-kindle. There’s a bunch of free titles on offer including Sudoku and Video Poker. They’re technically US-only, but you can temporarily transfer your account from UK to US in the Kindle’s settings, in order to make the purchase.
2. Tweak your Kindle email address
Every kindle comes with an @Kindle.com email address, but exactly what yours is might be a bit random. To change it, head to www.amazon.com/manageyourkindle and then click on ‘manage your devices’. From there you can edit the address to anything you like. Once you know the address you can email files directly to the Kindle.
3. Nab some more free eBooks
Gutenberg.org has over 36,000 free ebooks for the Kindle as well as a myriad other devices, all stores as PDFs. Just download them and dunk them into your Kindle via email to access your gratis library.
4. Browse the full web
It’s incredibly slow and more than a bit frustrating, but your Kindle does actually have a full web browser. To get to it, head to ‘Menu’ then the worryingly titled ‘Experimental’ and then ‘Launch Browser’. It works, but don’t say we didn’t warn you about its fiddliness.
5. Check your email
If you’ve got a browser, you can access email accounts. The kindle will be able to access your email through each service’s mobile version, so for gmail it’s m.gmail.com. Likewise, you can read your Facebook messages at m.facebook.com
6. Screen grab any page
Hold down the keyboard button and, while doing so, press the menu button. It’ll take a few seconds to compute, but then the screen will flash and deposit a .gif file of the image into your Kindle’s Documents folder.
7. Use it as a picture viewer
Use Photoshop or a free alternative to edit your pictures down to 520 px x 640 px, or if you can’t do that, anything less than 600 x 800. Compress a folder of edited pics into a .zip folder on your computer and copy it into your Kindle’s documents folder. From there it’ll appear like a book, letting you flick through each pic like a page.
8. Easily organise Kindle Collections
The lack of a physical keyboard makes this tricky on the new Kindle 4, so do it on your PC. As long as you’ve got the books pre-synced onto your Kindle, you can organise the Collections in the Kindle app for PC or Mac. Once your Kindle has synced with that, it’ll show your Collections on the device.
9. Get directions
That web browser comes in especially handy if you’ve got a 3G Kindle and get a bit lost. Open it up and direct it to maps.google.com. Google Maps should know where you are (so long as you have signal), but even if not it’ll let you search directions from any start and end point.
10. Publish a book to the Kindle Store yourself
Fancy yourself as a budding author? Amazon make it pretty easy to publish works to the Kindle Store through its subsidiary company CreateSpace. The steps there to help you format and upload both the copy and a cover are completely idiot-proof, and uploading is free. Amazon will, however, take a percentage of your asking price per sale.
Want more Kindle stuff? There’s this:
