tech, simplified.

Manage Your Kindle Personal Documents in Amazon Cloud Drive

One of the nicest Kindle features is that you can email your own eBooks and documents to a unique @kindle.com email address and they’ll automatically show up on your device. That same feature is what lets Instapaper and other services automatically send periodicals and books to your Kindle. It’s nice and simple.

There’s two major problems with it: one, it’s a pain to send a lot of documents to your Kindle wirelessly, and two, it’s very annoying to have a dozen old Instapaper archives in your Kindle Cloud account. For the former, it’s smarter to just connect it to your computer and copy the books over if you have a ton to move, but the only way to get around the latter problem is to delete each document individually from your Manage Your Kindle page.

Now there’s another option. Amazon has combined their Amazon Cloud Drive service with your Kindle Personal Documents, so you can see all the documents you or any 3rd party services have sent to your Kindle. Just login to Cloud Drive, open the My Send-to-Kindle Docs folder, and you can delete any files you want from there, and they’ll be deleted from your Kindle Cloud automatically. You’ll also notice now that you’ll have 10Gb of free storage space in Cloud Drive: 5Gb for free by default, and another 5Gb for your Personal Documents.

Unfortunately, you can’t add documents to your Kindle from Cloud Drive, at least not right now. You’ll instead still need to email documents and DRM-free books to your Kindle or use one of the Send to Kindle apps. The good thing is, those files are now much easier to manage in Cloud Drive, and they’re saved there in your original formats—no more having your documents converted to the kindle .az3 format by default.

Now, here’s to hoping that Amazon will eventually let you add documents to your Kindle just by saving them to that Cloud Drive folder. Until then, you can get something similar by getting IFTTT to email documents to your Kindle when you add them to a Dropbox folder.

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.