Maybe I’m the last person on earth to figure this out, but I have an old-style Kindle (read: the kind the dinosaurs used to read books about eating each other) and I thought my only option for reading PDFs on it was to, you know, drag-and-drop said PDF onto my Kindle drive when I had it plugged into my computer. The good news is that it works, but the bad news is that the formatting is all kinds of wonky, and the print is tiny. Sometimes I get e-books sent to me as PDFs and I really wanted to be able to put them on my Kindle and read them without a magnifying glass.
So I did some research, and what do you know—there’s actually free Amazon software that will automagically convert your files to Kindle versions. (Did you know this? How did I not know this??) You can download Send To Kindle for the Mac or for PCs to get started. You’ll need to go into Options to selection conversion, and yeah, the final result is not as nicely formatted as an actual Kindle book, but at least you can read it.
This is fantastic for those of us who are nerdly research graduate student types and love to sift through piles of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles instead of reading for fun. I’ve been doing this with my Kindle for a long time, and now have absolutely no excuses to ever relax again 😛
Thank you thank you thank you I knew there had to be an easier way.
If you dislike downloading programs to your computer, you can also do it this way:
All you have to do is send them to your amazon address “yourname@free.kindle.com” BE SURE YOU PUT CONVERT in the subject line. If you have wi-fi it will load it for free. If you don’t have wi-fi it will send it back to you in an e-mail and you just pull it over for free. Or…. if you don’t have wi-fi you can leave the free out of the address and you’ll get charged a very small amount and they will send it over. Real simple and you don’t need any other program to do this. If you don’t know what your amazon address is look for it under “my account”.