After reading the spiffy article about how to pack for trips in the latest issue of Martha Stewart Living, I’m filling my Sunday afternoon with pleasant thoughts about shoe bags, acid-free tissue paper, messenger totes, and the Amazon Kindle.
One thing I can’t figure out from Amazon’s website is… does the Kindle only read files you buy in the Kindle store, or can you load other file types onto it? For example, can I download my fill of Dickens and Thackeray from gutenberg.org, and read it on my Kindle?
I don’t know about plain text files from Project Gutenberg, but Fictionwise.com offers kindle MOBI format downloads. (They come out with a .prc extension, and are full of binary code.)
There are also some interesting results on google for ‘Project Gutenberg Kindle’
Files containing digital rights management software will not be readable.
The following file formats can be converted via e-mail for viewing on Kindle:
* Microsoft Word (.DOC)
* Structured HTML (.HTML, .HTM)
* JPEG (.JPEG, .JPG)
* GIF (.GIF)
* PNG (.PNG)
* BMP (.BMP)
PDF conversion is experimental. The experimental category represents the features we are working on to enhance the Kindle experience even further. You can email your PDFs wirelessly to your Kindle. Due to PDF’s fixed layout format, some complex PDF files might not format correctly on your Kindle.