I had to look twice at the press release about the new “Send to Kindle” program for Windows as on the face of it, it seems to be both obvious and something that you can already do with Windows. Only when I looked a bit deeper did I see where the value might be in this software and it might at first leave you scratching your head too.
Fundamentally the “Send to Kindle” software adds a “Send to Kindle” option to the Windows context menu in Explorer when you right-click on one or multiple files (I know, that’s what I thought too!) At its most basic this is just what it does. There are few other features however that make it a little more useful than a way to get files and eBooks onto your device a second or two more quickly than normal.
One of these is that the Kindle doesn’t need to be physically connected to your PC when you do it. The files will be synchronised with your Kindle Cloud and downloaded the next time the Kindle is on with WiFi activated. This means that if you don’t have your Kindle handy when you realise there’s a useful file you’d like on it, this isn’t a barrier.
The other way it is useful is with a “Print to Kindle” option that will allow you to send pretty much anything and everything to your Kindle through the Windows print manager. This latter feature will be genuinely useful for many people though, oddly, Amazon don’t make a fuss of either this or the wireless sync and you have do some digging on their website to find them out.
By default the Send to plug-in supports .DOC, .DOCX, .TXT, .RTF, .JPEG, .JPG, GIF, .PNG, .BMP and .PDF files though the printing option will extend this considerably. Printed documents are sent as PDF files.
You can download the Send to Kindle software from the Amazon website for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 and the Kindle apps for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch are also supported. Amazon say that support for other devices and for the Mac will be coming soon.
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