The Complete 2012 User's Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle: Covers All Current Kindles Including the Kindle Fire, Kindle Touch, Kindle Keyboard, and Kindle (20 page)

Amazon Prime members can choose from thousands of books in the Kindle Owners' Lending Library (http://amzn.to/vRLOfM) . Books in the library can be checked out for one month. Currently only one book can be borrowed at a time.

Press Menu and select “Shop in Kindle Store.” Select “See all categories”, and then select “Kindle Owner's Lending Library.” Browse or search to find a book, and then select the book to see its detail page. To borrow the book, select “Borrow for Free.” This button is grayed out and unavailable if the monthly borrowing limit (currently one book) has been reached.

From the Home screen, go to the Books library and tap on “Kindle Owners' Lending Library.” Then select a category to browse and swipe to see the entire list. When you find a book, tap it to see the book detail page. To borrow the book, select “Borrow for Free.” This button is grayed out and unavailable if the monthly borrowing limit (currently one book) has been reached.

Amazon might prefer that you get all your Kindle blogs and periodicals for a price in the Kindle Store, and those Kindle editions are tough to match when it comes to elegant formatting and the convenience of having new issues and posts pushed wirelessly to your Kindle in real time. However, there are a number of increasingly user-friendly ways to enjoy newspapers, magazines, and blogs free of charge on a Kindle; in this chapter we'll outline them and show you how to gain access..

Here are the basic steps:

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You can use your Kindle's web browser to read any one of millions of blogs and online periodical editions directly from the web. This works especially well on the Fire's Silk browser

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You can use any of several RSS feed services, such as Google Reader, to read content summaries on your Kindle and then click through to find what interests you.

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You can use Instapaper to flag, sort, and organize articles that interest you as you surf the web, sending them separately or in digest form to your Kindle.

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You can set up Calibre to fetch the latest issues of newspapers, magazines, and blogs and transfer them directly to your Kindle via an easy-to-use Calibre-to-Kindle USB connection.

All of these features are better than ever on the current Kindles for the following reasons:

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All models except the Kindle DX come with Wi-Fi, which is much faster than 3G for any activities other than reading an ebook or listening to an audio file.

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The E Ink Kindles come with the Kindle's relatively new webKit web browser based on the same platform that powers the Safari web browser. It's still a bit slow, but it is miles ahead of the previous Kindle web browser.

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Kindle Fire runs the fast new Silk browser

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The E Ink Kindle models feature the new E Ink Pearl display that renders 50 percent better contrast than previous Kindle displays, which is especially important when viewing web content formatted for a larger color screen.

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Kindles provide other features to enhance webpage viewing and reading, including Article Mode (a Menu selection that can be accessed while viewing any webpage on the Kindle) and several different "zoom" options

For many Kindle owners, the Kindle is all about convenience, and there is nothing at all wrong with that. When it comes to reading blogs on the Kindle, you may be perfectly content to pay a monthly fee for the convenience of having blog posts organized and pushed directly to your Kindle for a great reading experience without a lot of accompanying clutter. You may even be satisfied with Amazon's current selection of 13,102 blogs from which you may choose. If you're satisfied, you need not read further.

But there is another way.

By following the few very easy steps outlined in this chapter, you can adapt Google Reader to your Kindle so that it fetches the blog content you are most interested in reading and pushes that content right to your Kindle's web browser, where you may read it anywhere, anytime, and at absolutely no cost.

The first step, if you haven't already taken care of this, is to establish a Google account. As you follow various suggestions from our Kindle Nation Daily blog (http://bit.ly/rqYe2p) for making the most of your Kindle, it is very likely that you will be using several features of your Google account including Google Reader, Gmail, Google Blog Search, Google Search, Google Notebook, Google Calendar, Blogger, and Google News. Although we are still in the early days of the age of the Kindle, it is becoming increasingly clear that, whether or not Google and Amazon ever enter into any explicit joint agreements regarding services that optimize the Kindle, Google will be a steady source for useful enhancements for Kindle owners.

All of Google's services can be accessed through a single Google user account. For most people, the most convenient approach will be to use the same Google account on your Kindle that you use on your desktop or notebook computer. However, there may be some circumstances in which it is useful to employ separate accounts for different devices. For instance, if you use Google Reader to follow multimedia-intensive blogs on your computer, you may want to use a separate account for subscriptions to the more text-intensive blogs that are suitable for Kindle reading.

Creating bookmarks for Google Reader and other mobile Google services in your E Ink Kindle's web browser will save you and your thumbs a lot of extra work in the future, and it is an easy process:

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Make sure your Kindle's Whispernet wireless feature is turned on

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From your Kindle's Home screen, press Menu on the right edge of the Kindle

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Select "Experimental" from the menu, and then choose "web Browser"

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Once you are in the web browser, press Menu again and use the 5-way or scroll wheel to click on "Settings" from the menu selection. On the web browser's Settings page, enable (or verify that you have already enabled) Javascript and "Advanced" Mode (rather than "Default" Mode). Note: the web browser's Settings page is different from the Settings page accessible directly from your Kindle's Home screen. These settings are not available on the Kindle Touch and basic

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Click on "Enter URL" at the top of the next screen and type the following into the input field to the right of the "http://" prefix: m.google.com

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When the Google Mobile products page loads onto your Kindle screen, press Menu and select “Bookmark This Page”

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From the Google Mobile products page, select
 
"Reader" from the Google Mobile products choices

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When the Google Reader page loads onto your Kindle screen, press Menu and select “Bookmark This Page”

You will then have bookmarks for the top-level Google Mobile products page and for the Google Reader page. You may, of course, follow similar steps to bookmark other Google pages that you expect to use.

If a blog is not available in the Kindle Store, you will find it’s much easier to use your computer rather than your Kindle to search out your favorite blogs and add them to your Google Reader subscriptions—that way you have easier access to them on your Kindle. It is an easy process:

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Find a blog that you want to add to your Google Reader subscriptions. Find the RSS Feed button on the blog and copy the link for it. In many cases, you can simply type the blog's URL into the input field, rather than looking for an RSS Feed button.

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Open the main Google Reader page. The shortest URL we have found for this is reader.google.com. If you haven't already signed in with your Google account, do so.

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From the "sidebar" column to the left of your Google Reader screen, select the Add Subscriptions link.

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Copy the RSS feed link of the blog to which you want to subscribe into the input field that opens when you select the Add Subscriptions link. The blog will now be included in your Google Reader subscriptions. (As noted above, in many cases you can simply type the blog's URL into the input field, rather than looking for an RSS Feed button).

Once you have attended to the steps above, reading blogs on the Kindle is remarkably simple and user-friendly:

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Make sure that your Kindle's Whispernet wireless feature is turned on

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From your Kindle's Home screen, press Menu on the right edge of the Kindle

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Select "Experimental" from the menu selections, and select "web Browser"

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Choose "Google Reader" from your Kindle web browser's bookmarks (the bookmark is there because you followed the steps in an earlier section to create it). The Bookmarks page is the "default" page that usually appears first when you enter the web browser, but if another page comes up instead, just push Menu and select "Bookmarks”

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When the "Google Reader" page loads to your Kindle screen, you may be required to provide the log-in name and password of your Google account, but generally you will only be required to do this when your browser's cache has been cleared either manually or by a system reset. Once you log in, you are ready to start reading

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In order to "sort" your blogs and read only the posts on a particular blog, just select "Subscriptions" from the "Google Reader" page and select the blog you wish to read. In most cases, this will create a more pleasant reading experience than if you jump from one subject matter to another. It will also come in handy as a way of protecting you from losing track of the content on a two-posts-per-day blog that might otherwise be overwhelmed by posts from other blogs if you have subscribed to news-site blogs or other posts that are from prolific posters

Here's a cool web-based service that is primarily designed for E Ink Kindle owners. Instapaper provides a stunningly easy and convenient way to grab interesting content on the fly from any website and read it later on your Kindle.