Adding books to Kindle with Calibre mini-guide

[tapar]

Howdy,

My mother is getting a Kindle 2 for xmas this year and I figured I would set her up with Calibre and load it up with a bunch of ebooks for her. Then I remembered that she is not very computer savy so I figured I should put together some very detailed instructions to help her along. I cleaned it up a bit more then uploaded it to a free web hosting site so she could get at it through the web.

http://madravings.xtreemhost.com/CalibreInst.htm

I figured since it was already online I might as well share the link in case anyone has suggestions or might find it useful. I am probably not the only person trying to share the Kindle joy with the technologically impaired. Calibre is a very easy to use program, but I figured better over-explained than not.

Here is a link to the wiki version of the page: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Add_...o_Kindle_Guide

[daffy4u]

Cool! Thanks for sharing. That bit at the end about converting PDFs to mobi is a question that pops a lot. It's over my head but I'm sure it's going to helpful to a lot of people.

Thanks!

[Leep]

Thanks for sharing. Many folks will enjoy this. Have you thought about putting it up as a wiki?

cheers

[tapar]

Thanks, I wasn't sure how useful it would be to anyone else. It is pretty narrowly focused on using Calibre to find books and upload them to the Kindle. I figured that anyone who has installed Calibre and added books to Calibre's library wouldn't need anything like this. That would limit it's usefulness to people in similar situations to mine where they are setting things up for someone else and it can serve as a cheat sheet.

I had not thought of putting it up as a wiki. I am not too familiar with the process for doing that but I am willing to give it a shot. lol.

The biggest issue putting it together was editing it down. I kept wanting to add more too it, for example how to delete books from the Kindle, how to add books to Calibre, how to browse the books with coverflow, and also how to search based on tags. That stuff would be handy but also a bit daunting and have 'wall-of-text' issues.

I have been debating a bit about the part of the guide where I try to explain how to search. I thought about leaving it out to make the guide clearer and more concise. I left it in because searching is so helpful when there are many books in the library. It is the classic choice between information overload and making everyday use easier. I thought about leaving it out of the document and just explaining it in person, going for the "learn a little at a time" approach. That still may be the best way to go, lol.

[tapar]

I just finished creating a wiki page out of this and it can be viewed here: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Add_...o_Kindle_Guide

[daffy4u]

Excellent! I've added a link to your wiki page in the Visual Kindle Guide wiki.

[tapar]

Thanks! I just thought I would give a little update. I gave my mom the K2 (she loved it) and helped her set it up with some books and whatnot. I did run into a tiny snafu with the cheat-sheet guide though. She uses an older laptop with a smallish screen and runs at 1024x768. The screen shots pretty much filled the screen on her monitor and made it hard to use. I figure the simplest solution is to print it out for her. It is tempting to shrink the graphics more but then they become unreadable. It might be a good idea to shrink them in the wiki and have them be clicked to expand them...then again the point is to make it accessible for someone not too familiar with computers. lol.

[Nathan Campos]

Thanks very much for sharing. Now I'm using only Calibre to send the books to my Kindle.