Kindle Tips

Amazon has announced that they will increase the fee for sending your personal documents to your Kindle — and apparently they’ll start charging for it at all!

Starting May 4, in addition to the existing list of supported file types (DOC, HTML, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TXT, AZW, MOBI, PRC), you can send RTF files to your Kindle email address for convenient wireless delivery. In addition to the existing experimental support of PDF, you can also send DOCX files for conversion. Some complex PDF and DOCX files might not format correctly on your Kindle.

We have also modified the fee associated with sending personal documents wirelessly to your Kindle. This fee is now based on the size of your file. The fee for Personal Document Service (via Whispernet) is 15 cents per megabyte rounded up to the next whole megabyte.

Until this point, Amazon’s official policy was to charge 10 cents — but formally and in practical terms, Amazon did not apply any charge.    In a meeting with agents, Dan Slater at Amazon announced that they didn’t charge for sending documents, and they expected never to do so.

Personally, I’m quite disappointed in this policy – and that they announced this over their (largely book publicity) blog, with no email sent to Kindle owners.

If Amazon does put this into place, I would expect at minimum these files to be converted in better formats — the metadata changed to reflect the author and title, chapter headings and a table of contents indicated, and other functionality edits available.   I would also hope that Amazon makes a better home converter for personal documents available – not just unofficially relying on Mobipocket’s PC only document creator (or Calibre for Macs).

From Gear Diary via Publishers Lunch

XKCD creator Randall Munroe was bothered by having to exercise two or three muscles to hold his kindle up while reading in bed, lying on his side, so he created this lovely Kindle-holder:

(via Boing Boing Gadgets)