Kindle Ebooks: Tricky Stuff
reproduced with permission from Dale Lehman's former site
Kindle users will be happy to know that all of our ebooks are available in Kindle format as well as epub format. But as some of you may already know, loading an ebook from a website like ours onto your Kindle isn't quite as easy as you might think.
I don't own a Kindle myself, but I borrowed one to experiment with after being told that a book downloaded from our site onto a Kindle device wouldn't open. A quick web search revealed that a lot of people experience this kind of problem. From what I've read, it appears that if you download an ebook from Amazon you're in good shape, but if you download one from another source, it's another story entirely. The book will end up in the "Downloads" area of the web browser, and the only things you can do with it from there are email it to someone or delete it. If you try to open it, you'll get an error.
That's the bad news. The good news is that all is not lost. There are several ways you can get the downloaded ebook onto your Kindle for reading. It's just not entirely straightforward. I found a good explanation of the available procedures at About.com. The short version is as follows:
1. You can email the file to your Kindle email account. You'll need to set up a kindle.com email address and configure your Amazon.com Personal Documents Settings. Once that's done, files emailed to that address can be loaded onto the Kindle.
2. You can download the file to a computer, then plug your Kindle into it with a USB cable and transfer the file. The ebook file needs to go into the Kindle's Books folder. You may need to restart the Kindle afterwards to get the book to show up.
3. You can use Dropbox to transfer the downloaded ebook onto the Kindle's Books folder. You may need to restart the Kindle afterwards to get the book to show up.
With luck you'll be able to make one of these methods work for you without too much pain.