Reading PDFs on Kindle for free
After much anticipation, I have finally received my new Kindle 2 in the mail. Before I purchased the Kindle, I was assured by Amazon’s Kindle purchase page that PDF was natively supported. As I have a rather large collection of PDF eBooks and documents from Project Gutenberg and more, I was sold. Having my entire library with me (which would weigh a few metric tons if printed to paper) would now weigh only 10 ounces and fit in the palm of my hand. Brilliant!
Upon receiving the Kindle, I immediately opened it up and tested out the included dictionary (this is going to be awesome for Scrabble), the free (yes, FREE) global 3g internet access, and the user guide. With lifetime free 3g internet access to web pages and Wikipedia, this thing is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy incarnate.
After playing with all of the features, I immediately plugged my new Kindle in to my PC’s USB cable and transferred a few PDFs to the Documents folder of the Kindle. Nothing happened at first, but a little snooping around showed me that I just needed an update to the latest Kindle firmware. Once updated, I could view my PDFs, but the text was very small, and I was unable to scale it! Oh no! It appears only the Amazon (.azw), .TXT, and .MOBI files allow for text scaling.
After some searching around I found that you can email yourself (account_name@kindle.amazon.com) your PDFs and have them converted and delivered wirelessly to your kindle at $0.10 per document, but I also found a free way to do this and put together a few steps to make it easy. I hope this helps!
- Download and install the Auto Kindle eBook Converter open source software from:
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/autokindle/
- The Auto Kindle eBook Converter app is really just a set of AutoIT macros and other freeware and/or open source apps to automate the conversion of PDF to HTML, and HTML to .MOBI, which is natively supported by the Kindle.
- Open your registry (Start -> Run, type "regedit") and under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/*/Shell add a new key called "Convert to Kindle format".
- Add another key to this called "command" and double-click "Default" and set the value to:
- "C:\Program Files\Kindle Auto eBook Converter\Auto Kindle.exe" %1
- It should look something like this:
- Now, when you right click any PDF, LIT, CHM, or HTML file in Explorer, you can choose "Convert to Kindle format" without having to do them one at a time!
Tips:
- If you select multiple books it’ll likely take some time between each of them. I noticed up to a 20 second wait between two PDFs where nothing happened. Rest assured it will resume though. If you have a large collection, try letting it run overnight.
- To speed up conversion time, in the Auto Kindle Config program (Start -> All Programs -> Auto Kindle eBook Converter), disable conversion of images (uncheck "Process PDF Images"). I set mine to look like this to also ensure that the .MOBI file will end up in the same directory as my PDF, for easy finding:
- Some of the programs that the Auto Kindle eBook Converter macro set uses include nag text when converting some document types. For example the ABC Amber LIT Converter program (used to convert LIT to other formats) will insert their URL on each page of your document. To remove this "Amber line" go to "C:\Program Files\Kindle Auto eBook Converter\app\" and double-click "abcpalm.exe". At the top, click T, then O (for Options) and uncheck the "add Amber Line" checkbox, and click OK.
Found a better way? Leave a comment and I’ll be sure to review it! I’m especially looking for something that will retain the Table of Contents for PDFs!
Please let me know if there is any command line utility to run this kindle format converter?