Heartland

Oh collective of cloaked companions, i seek your knowledge.

I have bought a kindle (£89 in all good stores) for my first born.

Like apple before them, it appears amazon want me only to purchase from them with regard to the obtaining of product.
Are there alternatives to this, or is it better to buy direct from amazon?

I have sought answers from Mr.Google but all I get are references to other previous kindles, old articles or amazon links.

Any advice gets a nice early present - a Christmas kiss from a grateful Geordie

i'm pretty sure you can side-load non-drm ebooks in the .mobi format, but i'm not sure how

does your kindle have it's own email address? i know someone with the original 3g kindle and he could email books to his kindle's address...

i have an ipad with the kindle app and i use a piece of software (which might be mac only) called calibre tom convert books into mobi format

http://calibre-ebook.com/

and them something called iexporer to side-load the books into the kindle app's "ebooks" folder

http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/

there might be a similar combo of software you could use?

fiendy might know actually. i think he's got a kindle...?

Yeah you can download books in the .mobi format from sites such as http://www.gutenberg.org/ which has thousands of out-of-copyright books for free. You can just transfer them onto the kindle via the USB cable.

Also, you can email all sorts of files to either the 3G or the wifi-only versions (See here) and they get converted and picked up next time you sync the kindle. (PDF files work transferred directly in on the USB cable too).

When it comes to actually buying books I haven't strayed beyond Amazon as yet. But I've got loads of free stuff from project Gutenberg and a ton of PDFs (mostly origami stuff ) on there too.

cheers for the info... looked into project G, looks interesting.
"I've been helped!"

The plain-text .txt versions work on Kindle as well as the .mobi versions by the way.