How to send documents to a Kindle

It’s not hard to send and receive documents and have them show up on a Kindle. What is hard is finding the instructions, so I’m putting them in this blog post.

Each Kindle device has its own email address. With the device on, press the Menu button and select Settings. Your Kindle’s “name”@kindle.com e-mail address is listed under Device E-mail. Use the same name to also send documents to your Kindle at “name”@free.kindle.com . Just stick “free.” in front of the “kindle” part of your email and you won’t get charged anything. Give that email address to the person who is sending the document.

Now, not any person can send to that address, or you’d be getting a whole lot of spam. The person with the Kindle needs to let the device know to accept a document from a certain email address.

To do this, go to Amazon.com and click on My account toward the upper right corner. Scroll down to Digital Management and click Manage YourKindle.

Amazon will have you sign in.

Under Your Kindle Approved email List, type in the email of the person who is sending the document and click Add Address.

Now all the person has to do is send the document from the approved email address to the email of the Kindle device. Kindles will accept unprotected Microsoft Word, PDF, HTML, TXT, RTF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, PRC and MOBI files. As I recall, whatever is in the subject line of the email shows up where a book title would normally be. It might take a little time. Give it at least an hour before you start freaking out. And of course, the Kindle will need to be in a wifi zone or have 3G turned on or whatever in order to receive the document.

Those are the basic instructions for an all-text document that’s roughly book size. PDF files can be converted to Kindle format by typing “convert” in the subject heading of the email. If you’re doing more exotic things, go to this link for more instructions.

If these instructions don’t work for you, please let me know that in the comments.