really getting Kindle organized

I'm writing this post to really think through and get organized with reading on Kindle.

Useful Bookmarks

1. Kindle Library = view and read your Kindle books online (formerly Kindle Cloudreader?)
2. Kindle Book Notes and Highlights = read notes and highlights you made on your Kindle books (please notice that ONLY notes and highlights made on Kindle books are synced!)
3. Kindle Scribe Notebooks = view the notebooks you created in Kindle Scribe
4. Manage your Kindle Content by going to Accounts & List --> Content & Devices
5. Send to Kindle to easily upload personal documents to Kindle (again, please remember that notes and highlights made on personal documents do NOT Sync!)

Now a VERY IMPORTANT caveat. As an academic, I read a lot of articles. and as noted above only notes and highlights that are made in Kindle books are synced online and across devices. What that means is that if I start reading a personal document on my phone's Kindle app and make some notes and highlights, those notes and highlights will NOT sync when I start reading the same document on my regular Kindle. Worse, those notes and highlights are NOT easily available online in a repository (I'll describe how to get the notes out of documents below). This is a bit disappointing, but it hasn't been enough for me to give up my Kindle. Just keep in mind a best practice for reading personal documents in Kindle may be to make sure you make notes on only one Kindle device as much as possible.

Getting Documents into Kindle

Now that I've made that big warning about notes and highlights not syncing on Kindle, here's how you do get documents onto Kindle. Kindle has come a long way since its early days and it's actually quite easy to get documents onto Kindle now. There are three main methods: 

1. mail them to your personal Kindle email (go to Account and Lists --> Content and Devices --> Devices --> Kindle (once you choose your Kindle device, you'll see the kindle email associated with your device) 
2. go to Send to Kindle (PDF, DOC, DOCX, TXT, RTF, HTM, HTML, PNG, GIF, JPG, JPEG, BMP, EPUB; Max file size: 200 MB) and drag your file into the window. 
3. install a browser extension and use the extension

So far, I've liked the Send to Kindle page best. Whatever method you choose, within a few minutes, your document is ready to be downloaded on your Kindle for viewing.

 

Reading PDFs on Kindle May be Hinky

As I mentioned, I read quite a few PDFs so I uploaded a PDF using that Send to Kindle page to see what reading a PDF was like. The good news is that the PDF was seamlessly delivered to Kindle. But PDFs can be hinky on Kindle. While they're readable, I found the experience far from perfect. After all, Kindle is NOT a bells and whistles PDF reader. Kindle basically treats the PDF as an image, so while a PDF could be read on Kindle Paperwhite, it still required a little zooming in places. A PDF rendered even better on the larger Kindle Scribe and had the the added advantage of allowing me to write directly an the document (I must admit it almost felt like reading and scribbling on a paper PDF, it was that good!). BUT, and this is a big 'but', I couldn't select or highlight text on the PDF or even add any sticky notes.

Easiest Way to Turn PDFs to DOCX or EPUB Format

So I checked to see how easy it would be turn my PDF into a Kindle formatted document for reading. In past years, I remember this being a real pain and I remember giving up on this. But again, technology has come a long way. Now a PDF can be easily turned into a Word or even EPUB document just by using Google Drive then uploaded to Kindle in five easy steps (all FREE!):

1. save the PDF in Google Drive
2. locate the PDF in Google Drive online
3. right-click then choose Open with --> Google Drive
• this coverts the PDF into a Google doc and there will usually be a few word formatting errors; you could go through and fix these if you want or leave them if you don't mind the few spacing issues
• tables and charts will definitely need fixing-- I usually go back to the original document and use an image capture tool (such as Microsoft's Snipping too) and paste the chart image back into the Google doc.
4. when you're ready, choose File --> Download as --> docx or EPUB, etc. (choose the format you want-- docx works best)
• after some more tests, I think the version that works best is to make sure the document is in LEFT Align (NOT justified or block paragraphs) and download as docx files. The epub formatted files made the table unreadable whereas the docx file seemed to allow the chart to flow more. 
5. finally, go to the Send to Kindle page and upload your new Kindle-ready/friendly file

The other way to do this is to just email it to your Kindle address, attach the pdf, and type the word "Convert" in the Subject line so Amazon knows to convert the PDF to the kindle format. It worked, but when you do it this way, all the problems of the conversion remain and you won't be able to fix them (e.g. words with odd spaces, tables and charts), so I prefer the Google Drive method.

 

Getting Notes Out of Personal Documents

The only way to get notes out of the personal documents is to export them.

What I Would Love to See

In an ideal world, here's what I would want:

• see my documents in my online Kindle Library
• be able to sync notes and highlights across all content including my documents
• be able to access Kindle Scribe Notebooks online -- at present, the only way to access these notebooks is in Kindle or by emailing them to yourself as a PDF (!) this is actually already available! I learned this thanks to the good people on this reddit forum