I think a post removing what seem to be some very popular misconceptions about the Kindle is in order.
1) You CAN read PDFs on Kindle, albeit only after having Amazon convert then for you or converting them yourself to PRCs using Mobipocket's Creator software which is freeware.
To quote Amazon's help page:
You can download the Mobipocket creator here. In my experiments it created a well formatted PRC file out of a complex PDF with images. It was very readable.
Converting PDF Files
PDF conversion is experimental. The experimental category represents the features we are working on to enhance the Kindle experience even further. You can email your PDFs wirelessly to your Kindle. Due to PDF's fixed layout format, some complex PDF files might not format correctly on your Kindle.
2) There seems to be a way to have Amazon convert DOC and other formats into the native Kindle format (AZW) for FREE. Again, to quote the Kindle Help page from Amazon.
Delivery to Your Amazon.com Account E-mail Address
If you are not in a wireless area or would like to avoid the ten-cent fee, you can send attachments to "name"@free.kindle.com to be converted and e-mailed back to your computer at the e-mail address associated with your Amazon.com account. You can then transfer the document to your Kindle using your USB connection.
So there, I hope that was helpful to you. Let the games begin!
18 comments:
You can add a *wireless* SD card to the Kindle, the kind with say 1-2GB of flash memory addressable wirelessly. And go to town with the "@free" conversions, without ever having to plug in your device.
anonymous: Interesting!
I don't know if you're reading these, but I can go you one better on converting PDF files. You can convert PDF files and MAINTAIN FORMATTING.
if you send an image based PDF file to the converter address, amazon will split each page in half horizontally, and display it as a single page rotated 90 degrees on the kindle. I've used this method to read several scientific papers at this point. The key is that it has to be an image based pdf, as in, non-searchable. Since most PDFs aren't like that, a great way to use this is to get imagemagick and use the following command
convert -density 120x120 [searchable].pdf out.pdf
which will produce an image based PDF file from the searchable pdf file given. Then just send that through and read away! I was about 2 minutes away from returning the kindle when I found this, but I'm pretty sure it's here to stay now.
njustn - That's an EXCELLENT tip. I will update this post tonight and quote you! Thanks!
No problem, I thought you might like that, and am pretty sure it'll be useful for others like me reading complex pdfs all the time. Also created a thread for it over on mobileread which has yet to be approved but sometime soon I imagine.
Converting complicated pdf file to kindle format which mainly consists of tables and images is quite tough as Amazon is still in experimental stage to make it perfect, but very recently I came across one website which provide ebook conversion service along with kindle ebook conversion at very affordable rates, mostly for the PDF ebook which consists of tables and images which are quite tough to convert them to ebook format such as mobipocket, kindle or MS reader, but I have found that the above ebook conversion company converts these type of ebooks in more profession and efficient way at very reasonable rate.
> get imagemagick and use the following command
> convert -density 120x120 [searchable].pdf out.pdf
This gives me an error after installing ImageMagick on Mac OSX. It looks like you also have to install GhostScript (at least), which in turn requires (at least) a jpeg library.
> amazon will split each page in half
> horizontally, and display it as a
> single page rotated 90 degrees on the kindle.
How did you get the pages to split? Neither Amazon nor Mobipocket Creator did this for me, and it makes the output pretty much unreadable, since they shrink the text to fit to the height of the page. Text was totally unreadable until I started using ImageMagick’s -trim option. Fiddling with -resize and -adaptive-resize didn't seem to help.
(BTW, I got ImageMagick to install on my Mac using MacPorts; the binary distributions seemed to have faulty dependencies, and the error reporting was unhelpful.)
The page is only split at a point where nothing is in the way, so on a full page of just text, right at the middle, but if there is a full page image, it will not split it. Usually that's good behavior actually, because it means it wont split a graph, but for things like comic books, manga, or things which have an image background or border it's a problem I have not yet found a solution for.
Has someone figured out how to read 'passworded' PDFs on the kindle? I have quite a few text books that would be great to carry around in my kindle.
I could only see half-page portrait-mode (did not rotate 90 degrees). The PDF files are text only. Followed the instructions as given. Please help.
I have found the customer support for the Kindle lacking a bit. The other day I did find a new website called Kindlehelpdesk.com which actually has a lot of the information about the kindle consolidated. I hope more sites offer help like this one.
Has anyone actually been able to get the imagemagick solution to work??
"convert -density 120x120 [searchable].pdf out.pdf"
I just get error messages that the either the input file or image file doesn't exist.
I'm using ImageMagick-6.4.1-Q16 on Windows XP.
Seems like it should be straightforward...
Hello Mike, I am reluctant to the company you provided www.kindleconversion.com for the kindle conversion they provide best service.
The ImageMagick solution is clever. For those of you who want to split pages in half with manga and such, you should take a look at the ImageMagick draw command. Here is a place that you can check out for a quick solution: http://www.scri8e.com/IM_Tutor/draw.html.
To answer another post, I suggest NOT using macports to install ImageMagick on a mac. Try the following solution: http://onrails.org/articles/2007/11/03/installing-rmagick-on-leopard-without-macports-or-fink. Ignore the fact that it is a rails tutorial. It will cover what you need. If you decide to go this route, please read jims comment on substituting the curl -O command for wget. Or if you feel really daring, you can install wget from source as well (which does not require much more than a ./configure and sudo make install). Also keep in mind that for non-programmers, the last command to be run on that page is "sudo gem install RMagick". YOU DO NOT NEED TO DO THIS. In fact, I feel it is a bad idea even as a programmer to start putting self built files wherever the os wants to put them. Anyhow, thanks for the write up. I am still trying to decide on getting a kindle or not. I'm sure it would be a no-brainer if they had more tech titles and offered free blog downloads rather than a monthly fee.
Also, as a note, I have used ImageMagick for a long time now and keep my version up to date. I have a friend that used the site above to install on 10.5 and he had no problems at all. If you do not feel comfortable at all on the command line, I suggest learning a bit more before you start issuing commands you do not understand. Basically, you can mess up your system badly if you run commands without checking them out first. Finally, please do NOT EVER run the following command as sudo or when logged in as root "rm -rf /". Never do this if someone tells you to. Never!
I listen to text, wordfiles and pdfs converted into mp3s. Have you found any way to convert a kindle file into any of these formats? I'd gladly pay for the kindle files. I just have much more time to listen than read.
When you can send attachments to "name"@free.kindle.com to be converted, how do you get the meta data to convert correctly? The title of the file becomes the title displayed on the Kindle, but the author becomes my email address, rather than the author of the book. That will cause some major sorting issues.
I just created a new website where you can post text documents that can be directly downloaded via the kindle's wireless connection for free. It is located at www.kindlecreek.com Currently in a growing stage, there you can access directly from your Kindle's web interface under "Experimental". The site is set up Kindle friendly for viewing and access. Anyone with a document or textual work that they would like to make available for other Kindle users to read, please email your text or word doc and I will gladly post it to the site.
email to publish@kindlecreek.com
Also started a related yahoo group called KindleCreek. Check it out. Open for all suggestions and comments.
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