Wow!

[mmegaera]

Happy birthday to me! (a bit early, my birthday is April 8 -- yes, Easter Sunday -- but I was told by the giver to open upon arrival)

I haz a Kindle! Of my very own!

Of course, I don't have WiFi at home, so I'll have to stop at the library tomorrow and activate it...

I don't want to have WiFi at home, because then I'd be able to get online with my netbook at home, and my netbook is my writing computer, and I don't want the distraction (believe me, if I can get online when I should be writing, I will -- willpower does not work in this situation). But apparently I can buy ebooks through Amazon on my computer and then transfer them via the USB cord once I get the thing registered. I hope so.

Any suggestions on how to deal with a Kindle without handy WiFi would be most appreciated.

Comments

[threeringedmoon]

Calibre! Calibre is an open source ebook library manager that works on many platforms. It will allow you to convert epub and other formats to .mobi so you can side load them onto your Kindle. (Sideload is loading stuff via the USB cable from your computer.) As downloaded, Calibre won't strip DRM from your Amazon Kindle files, though reportedly there may be plugins that allow you to do so if you roll that way. Dear Author has some good tutorials including

http://dearauthor.com/ebooks/setting-up-a-new-library-with-calibre-user-created-columns-and-saved-searches

Calibre's website:

http://calibre-ebook.com/

Because it is a Java application, it can look a little clunky, but the functionality is pure gold.

[mmegaera]

Thank you. I have Calibre on my netbook already [g]. I use it to buy and read non-Amazon ebooks (I had to have it to buy books from Carina Press, IIRC). I just didn't realize I could use it to transfer files to the Kindle because I figured since it wasn't an Amazon product it wouldn't work with the Kindle.

And thank you for the link to the tutorial. I suspect I'm going to need it [g].