Everywhere I go now there are people sitting on beaches or by the pool or at airports etc. reading their latest book on a Kindle. In a previous article I showed you how to transfer books from your PC to your Kindle using the built-in File Management software on your PC.
All of this is still valid but there is another much easier way to transfer books straight onto a Kindle, and maybe rename them or change the cover picture etc.
I speak here of Kindle books which you may have been given or have downloaded from the Internet, NOT those you purchase from Amazon as the latter are transferred to your Kindle on demand.
There are many types of ebooks out there on the Internet and they have different extensions to their file names. Files with extensions .mobi and .prc are already compatible with the Kindle whilst the other main category is the .epub extension which cannot be used directly.
Now if you search out and download a programme called Calibre, a genuinely free piece of software (although they welcome small contributions to help with their development) which will keep all of your books together, enable editing of their titles or cover pictures, and will also translate books with a .epub extension into a .mobi book allowing it to be read on the Kindle.
Full instructions come with the download of the software and it is simplicity itself to install and use. One of its beauties is that it recognizes when you have your Kindle plugged in to the PC and when you want to send a book to the Kindle you click on its title in Calibre then click on a button at the top which says “Send to Device” and the transfer is done for you.
I have several collections of books by my favourite authors and obviously the titles don’t necessarily follow on from one another. I rename my books so that they display in the correct order. For example, my books by Peter Robinson about Inspector Banks, the detective in Yorkshire, I rename them with the prefix “Banks 01.....”, “Banks 02......” etc.
These titles are then transferred to the Kindle along with the book allowing easy finding of a book in a particular series or genre.
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