Kindle2 PDF to AWZ Conversion
For a look at the new Kindle2 unboxed, a review of the awesome device itself, or a list of pros and cons, you’ll have to look elsewhere. For what it’s worth, I just got my Kindle2, and I think it’s better than actual books.
One often overlooked feature is Amazon’s Kindle PDF/Microsoft Word .doc to AWZ (kindle format) conversion service. For just $.10 an attachment, they will convert files for you into Kindle format, and transmit them wirelessly to your device! A question you might ask is how does the converted file look, and is it readable?
First, the new file is transmitted and named exactly as the attachment is named. The “author” field is your email address, so you can quickly distinguish the converted pdf from your purchases on the Amazon Kindle store.
The conversion doesn’t know about tables of contents, footnotes, copyright statements, prefaces, or any other book convention. It simply reads in the file you gave it, and spits it out onto your Kindle in the same format. So, the indentation may be screwy, and there may not be any chapters or other marks–it will read as a single continuous chunk of text. That said, it is legible and works, although the experience is somewhat degraded from what you’d buy in the Kindle store.
You can also get text (as above) which came from a page marking randomly inserted into the paragraph flow. Converting PDFs is definitely not glitch free, but at least it only costs you $.10 a try!
| This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 8:41 pm and is tagged with microsoft word doc, amazon kindle, paragraph flow, conversion service, format conversion, author field, prefaces, indentation, tables of contents, glitch, footnotes, pros and cons, chunk, legible, pdfs, microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
One important point, there is also a FREE conversion, where you can send files to free.kindle.com and have them forwarded back to your not-wireless email account for USB transfer to the Kindle. Without the wireless charges, you avoid the US$0.10 fee.
I also bought the Kindle version of Snow Crash on Amazon and was shocked that after buying on the home computer browser, it wa already loaded on the Kindle2 by the time I closed the browser and opened up the Kindle2. Awesome.