How to Move Your Documents to Your Kindle Without Depending on Amazon
If you have a Windows PC and a Kindle, I highly recommend MobiPocket Reader software. It’s free. The download link is in the blog item.
http://www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSoft/ProductDetailsReader.asp
You should try using it to convert plain text books (like the ones on my CDs and DVDs). Just open the reader software, click on Import (from the selections at the top of the screen), then in the drop-down menu that appears click on Text document, then navigate to select the file you want. In a few seconds, the software creates a copy in its special format (.prc) and puts that copy in a new folder (My Ebooks, under My Documents). The book appears on your screen ready to read, in a format that lets you flip pages (left to right), rather than scroll down; and when you copy that .prc file to your Kindle, the books shows up with with an even (rather than ragged) right margin — very readable. (Thanks to David Green in Idaho for pointing this out to me).
Conversions from .txt, .pdf, and .html documents .prc happen instantaneously. And you can move .prc files directly to your Kindle over the USB cable, without depending on Amazon for conversions. NB — if you wanted to put some of your own Word documents on your Kindle, you could (in Word) save those documents as .html, and then use MobiPocket to convert them to .prc (This works great for text, but charts/tables and graphics probably won’t come out the way you want them.)
MobiPocket also makes it a lot easier and more pleasant reading books on your PC.
Richard Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com