Read web articles on Kindle

One of the main reasons for me to fall in love with such basic device as Kindle is the ability to read much more than books. In fact you can read EVERYTHING on Kindle. I've stopped reading anything longer than a couple of paragraphs on the computer screen and my eyes are quite grateful to me.

You can easily read everything from your daily online newspaper, magazines, random articles found over the web, blog post, etc. And the best thing is that there is no need to install anything. Here are the best and easiest way to do it:

• Klip.me offers the best option. There is a browser extension which works, but why not just use the bookmarklet and not install anything that slows down your web browser. Great service, great options, totally free. Although it is incredibly easy to set up this Klip.me bookmarklet don't forget to read the instruction and go to your Personal Document Settings on Amazon Manage Your Kindle website allow receive stuff from Klip.me.

• Although extremely rarely I've seen the above bookmarklet saying it can't deliver the requested article. In such cases I use Tinderizer, i.e. another bookmarklet. Works flawlessly, but doesn't have any options - you just click on it and receive the web page nicely formatted for Kindle.

The above are the best and easiest options for reading articles you stumble upon over the web. I haven't seen an article that you can't get to read on your Kindle using one of these. Of course there are several others, including more well known like Instapaper or the Amazon's own tool, available as an extension for Firefox or Chrome. Surprisingly the later is the worst and have many problems delivering the content.

How to read PDF files on Kindle the right way

Finding novels and all kinds of fiction as e-book (mobi, epub etc.) is relatively easy. Most people use their Kindle just for that. Unfortunately many non-fiction books and the vast majority of scientific articles are available only as a scanned pdf file, which is simply unreadable on the small 6" screen. If the pdf contains plain searchable text with no tables, diagrams, images or weird formatting you can convert it through Amazon Send to Kindle service. For more complicated pdf (or even djvu) you have to do a extra step:

There is one just AMAZING tool named K2pdfopt which solves all your Kindle pdf problems and makes reading PDF on Kindle possible. Just download and convert with the default options working flawlessly 90% of the time. The resulting pdf file can be sent to the Kindle via usb to the documents folder or delivered wirelessly through Send to Kindle. The drawback is that you can't do text search in the resulting pdf, but even that is fixable if you check the K2pdfopt options and OCR details or have access to a commercial software like Abbyy PDF Transformer.

I have't found any pdf K2pdfopt is unable to deal with, even some awfully tilted scans were quite readable. Still you may consider BRISS, a much simpler tool which lets you crop the white space around the text in a pdf file, thus making the text bigger and more easily readable on Kindle screen, while preserving the ability to search inside the text.

Get all the highlights and notes from your Kindle

All Kindle highlights, notes and bookmarks are stored in My Clippings.txt file in documents folder. The file is easily accessible from the home screen, but quite messy and not that easy to manipulate. Amazon does not offer an easy way to extract or share these. You can connect the Kindle to a computer via USB and copy the file and then open it in any text editor. Still it is very uncomfortable if you have a lot of highlights and full articles. Fortunately there is solution to the My Clippings issue.

• If you read only books from Amazon you can access your highlights at https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights But even this way your notes are from from being in good order. The downloadable Kindle application also has such severe limitations and lacks exporting functions.

• If you are like me, reading a lot of web articles, personal documents and non Amazon books you are completely on your own to find a solution. The best option is without doubt ClippingsConverter service. While it has some shortcomings this tool is by far the best way to liberate your clippings and even lets you export them Excel, Word, PDF and even Evernote. You need to register with your email, but it is worth. No easy way to share your clippings directly, but it is still the best free tool out there and I do not find any real bugs.

• Another good free online option is Clipper. It it is even more basic and straightforward and does not require registration. It even lets you grab a permanent link to share the My Clippings content, but in much much friendlier order. Unfortunately this tool has problems with non-English characters.

• People who prefer stand alone applications or are more concerned of their privacy online could check DaleyKlippings. I have not really worked with this one as ClippingsConverter serves all my humble needs and I do not feel like downloading some 17 MB app just to read a plain text file.

• There is also an easy way to convert the Kindle highlights to academic citations online. This script does the job, but as most e-books are provided without proper pages it is far from universal solution. Citing some kindle location is not that credible

If somebody is aware of a better free online Kindle clippings applications, please share your wisdom. And in case there are curious ones willing to check some of the witty highlights from my Kindle, you are welcome.

Fit more text on Kindle screen

One of the main reasons for me buying a Kindle was to reduce the eye fatigue. Probably the first setting I've changed was to increase the font size by one step. Doing so I've noticed how large portion of the Kindle screen is being wasted and left blank. Sure you could alter the "Words per Line" setting under "Change Font Size" section, but it lets you only increase the margins around the text, thus waste even more of your 6'' screen.

With some very easy tweaking (no skills required) there is a way to reclaim the full screen for reading. This is not hacking, you can not kill your device that way and it will not void the warranty. Still you can alter only the horizontal margins, the vertical ones are fixed. Here are the required steps:

1. Connect your Kindle to a computer via the USB cable.
2. Open system folder (hidden by default) on the Kindle. Open com.amazon.ebook.booklet.reader subfolder.
3. Open reader.pref file with notepad or similar text editor.
4. Change the value of HORIZONTAL_MARGIN to 10 (default is 40). You can put only values that are multiple of 10. In other words you can use 10, 20, 30 etc., but not 15 or 17.
5. Save the file.
6. Restart Kindle, i.e. from home screen go to settings, then press settings button and select restart.
7. Now enjoy a bit (more than 10% wider) wider screen and less page turning.

Note: If you can't find system folder, go to Windows Explorer settings and check Show hidden/system files.