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How to add personal documents to Kindles and Kindle apps

How to add personal documents to Kindles and Kindle apps

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Users of Amazon's Kindle app on iOS can now have documents delivered via email, a feature that has been available for some time for Kindle device users. This how-to goes over the basics of emailing a file to your Kindle or Kindle app.

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Amazon Personal Document
Amazon Personal Document

For a while now, Kindle users have been able to email personal documents directly to their devices. Now, Amazon has extended that support to anyone with the latest version of the Kindle iOS app. Upon updating, we were able to get everything from photos to game manuals on an iPhone 4S. Sending a document takes a little setup, but it's easy to do and supports a range of file types.

Before doing anything else, you'll want to make sure that the Kindle or app you're using is registered with your Amazon account. If you've signed in with your Amazon account, it should be. Once that's covered, it's just a matter of going through the following steps:

1. Register your email address

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Only email addresses that you pre-approve can send documents to your reader. This has to be done on Amazon's website — yes, we know it would make sense to be able to do it from the app, but that's just not how this works. Go to "Manage Your Kindle" under your account settings, and under "Approved Personal Document E-mail List," add the email address you want to send from. Once it's saved once, you can use it for any device.

2. Check your Kindle address

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On the same page as your approved address list, you'll see a section called "Send-to-Kindle E-Mail Settings." This is where you'll see the addresses for your individual devices, likely something like [youraccountname]@kindle.com. Clicking "Edit" next to any device will let you customize the address for it. This information can also be found on individual devices; on iOS, for example, you can open the Kindle app and go to the "Docs" tab to see the email.

3. Enable archiving (optional)

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If you just want to quickly send a document to your phone or Kindle, you can skip this step. If you want to keep an online library of your documents, however, you'll want to check the "Personal Document Archiving" section of the page and make sure that archiving is enabled. After you've emailed a document, it will show up in the "Personal Documents" page of your online Kindle library, and can be resent to other devices.

4. Send your document

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With your settings tweaked, it's time to send the document. Create an email to [youraccountname]@kindle.com, and add the documents as attachments. Make sure it's one of the supported file types found here — most documents and images will be all right, although PDFs are still listed as "experimental." Multiple files can be either sent as separate attachments to the same email or attached as a single zip file. If you want to have a file converted into Amazon's .azw format, put "convert" in the subject line.

5. Check your app or Kindle

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Open the Kindle library on your device or app and refresh to check for your document. Any single non-PDF file under 5MB should arrive within five minutes; outside that, you'll be looking at increasingly longer times. Once you've received a document, bookmarks and other changes will sync across the iOS app just as they do on the Kindle.