Amazon folds Kindle cloud storage into cloud drive

[fjtorres]

http://www.the-digital-reader.com/ca...cloud-storage/

Emails going out this morning:

Dear Kindle Customer,

As a past user of personal documents on Kindle devices or reading apps, we are pleased to let you know about some improvements we've made to how personal documents work.

Personal documents are now in Amazon Cloud Drive: Starting today, all personal documents that you have archived in your Kindle Library will be available to access, delete, organize, and share from your Amazon Cloud Drive. You can see these documents in a new "My Send-to-Kindle Docs" folder alongside all of your saved content such as photos and personal videos.

There is no action required on your part. Your personal documents features will continue to work just as they have in the past. And as always, you can use Manage Your Kindle to see a list of your documents, re-deliver them to Kindle devices and free reading apps, delete them, or turn off auto-saving of documents to the cloud. Documents will be delivered just as they have in the past and you will continue to have 5 GB of free cloud storage for your personal documents. Just "Send Once, Read Everywhere."

Documents stored in their native format: Also starting today, new documents that you save to the cloud with Send to Kindle will be stored in their native format (e.g. MS Word, TXT) so you can access them anywhere from Amazon Cloud Drive.

As the blog points out:

At long last Amazon has decided to rationalize the storage space they give to Kindle users. By combining it with the Amazon Cloud Drive, Amazon is both simplifying the management issues and giving Kindle users a better suite of tools for managing their personal documents (the manage your kindle page is terrible, simply terrible).

It also lets Amazon cut costs by consolidating two cloud services and management tools into one. They can benefit from lowering their operational costs, no?

Minor move but at least they're making moves to beef up Kindle.

[tubemonkey]

About time!

[tomsem]

This seems to get us around the 50MB limit on documents (it is now 2GB). I was able to upload such a file and then download it to a device. Hooray!

However, I was not able to move one of my .azw3 (kf8-only) and see it on a device. Maybe I was not patient enough.

It will be interesting if this bypasses the 'sanitizing' of files that goes on when you use send-to-kindle. I used to rely on it to strip source archive but that doesn't seem to be happening now (file size remains more or less the same).

At any rate, this is a very nice option to have.

[tomsem]

Also you can download the files (which you could not do with Personal Documents previously), and share a link to them with others. It stores files in native format (Word, TXT) presumably converts these on the fly when downloading to Kindle?

[eschwartz]

This is already being discussed here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=237755