Here’s a neat idea a visitor to this site, Larry Goss, submitted. Thanks Larry!

I have a nifty (at least I think it’s nifty) idea for making it easy to find desired content on the Kindle using a “taglist” file and the Kindle’s Search function.  I’d like to contribute this idea to this web site.  Here’s a sample, a few entries from my own taglist.txt file:

” Is Amercia Losing At Globalization?”
qeconomics qglobaleconomy
” Is Amercia Losing At Globalization?”
Newsweek Sep 8, 2008
————————————-
” Big Russ & Me ”
qbio qRussert qnonfiction
” Big Russ & Me ”
Tim Russert
————————————–
” King Lear ”
qPlay qShakespeare qtragedy qfiction
” King Lear ‘
William Shakespeare
————————————–
” The Island of Dr. Moreau ”
qscifi qadventure qfiction
” The Island of Dr. Moreau ”
H. G. Wells

You guys are probably smart enough to figure out how to use this as well as how to create this.  But in case you didn’t get enough sleep last night, the tags are the words that begin with the letter q.  One searches on the applicable tags and gets a Results screen with a list of only those documents that the user has associated with those tags.  One can then do another search on the document title and Kindle will bring that up for them.

Larry Goss

Here’s a hack to add your own pictures to the Kindle to be used as the screensaver images that get rotated thru.

Adding Pictures to the Kindle Screensaver

1. Connect to your Kindle via USB.
2. Create a folder named ‘pictures’
3. Within that new folder, create another folder name ‘My Pictures’
4. Copy any number of pictures you want into the new ‘My Pictures’ folder. 600×800 is the size of the screen display.
5. On the Kindle, go to the Home Screen
6. Press ALT+Z
7. There should now be a ‘book’ named ‘My Pictures’ displayed.
8. Open the ‘book’ to start the picture viewer.
9. Cycle thru all of the pictures pressing F (to make them full screen), then ALT+shift+0 (the number zero) to select each one for the screensaver.

Mobi2mobi can handle Kindle AZW files and can change some of the metadata in DRMed Kindle books. You can obtain mobi2mobi in the Mobiperl package available from https://dev.mobileread.com/trac/mobiperl/wiki

Use the following mobi2mobi command to change the Kindle display title for your DRMed Kindle books:

mobi2mobi --output [output filename] --exthtype updatedtitle --exthdata "[Corrected Title]" [original AZW filename]


Highly recommended. The SFBags – Waterfield Travel Case for the Kindle is a well-made quality case for your Kindle. Plus the customer service is top notch.

A great source of e-book conversion utilities can be found at http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_conversion. There you will find various commercial, opensource and freeware programs that can handle file formats like LRF, CHM, LIT, HTML, PDF, RTF, PDB and DOC and convert them to formats that the Kindle can handle.

Amazon Kindle File Formats

• AZW
• TXT
• MOBI
• PRC

Note that Amazon offers its conversion via email service for the following file formats;

• Word DOC
• HTML
• JPEG
• TXT
• GIF
• PNG
• BMP
• PDF (experimental, results vary)

Users who have experienced the ‘unexpected error message’ on their Kindle have reported that they were able to resolve the problem by either restarting the Kindle from the Settings Menu, or reseting the Kindle using the reset button on the back of the Kindle.

When the Kindle is connected to your PC via the provided USB cable, it appears on the PC side as a drive. If you have installed a SD Card, that also appears as a second drive.

• To move e-books, music, or pictures to and from the Kindle and PC, you must drag and drop them between the appropriate USB drive’s target folder and the location you keep them on your PC, e.g., My E-books, My Music, etc.
• The Kindle does not initiate any type of automatic synchronization of the material, you must manually keep things synchronized by dragging and dropping and deleting files as appropriate.

Here is the impact of creating folders on the Kindle’s SD card;

• If you create the folder in the root directory of the card, for example, a ‘read books’ folder, that folder and its contents are not visible on the Kindle.
• If you create the folder in the ‘documents’ folder of the card, the folder itself does not appear on the Kindle, however, the contents of the folder and any sub-folders are found and displayed.

Unfortunately, this behavior doesn’t help much in terms of organizing your books on the Kindle. Hopefully, a future firmware upgrade will change that.

Ran across a neat hack to download free e-books from feedbooks.com using Kindle’s Whispernet. It’s documented at http://www.feedbooks.com/help/kindle and works by downloading a book that contains embedded links to downloadable e-books that can be downloaded via Whispernet for free.

Project Gutenberg has tons of free books available for download. Unfortunately, the formating leaves much to be desired when they are viewed on the Kindle.  Gutenmark to the rescue. This neat commandline utility can reformat the Gutenberg book into a much more readable html format that Kindle displays nicely.