I am reposting a lightly edited piece I wrote last year at this time.
If estimates are right, around 5 million people have purchased or received as gifts a Kindle this season. So now what do you do. Below the jump you can find out about borrowing books, importing books, audiobooks, tracking the prices of kindle books, finding new books, getting your questions answered and more.
Cover via Amazon
Free Books
One of the first things you want to do is check out free books. There are a lot of free books, in fact because of the new Kindle Select program for authors there will probably be around 100 500-600 free books a day for quite a while. So you have a couple of options. The two I recommend are ereaderiq or Booksontheknob. They take two different tacks. Ereaderiq will send you a daily email of 30 to 40 recommend kindle books divided into genre, with a short summary and a book cover. You can customize the email to be the genres that you are most interested in. Book On The Knob for the most part ignores all the independent books and only talks about free books from the major publishers. You can follow Books on the Knob on their RSS, Facebook or Twitter Feed.
You can also follow Bookwi.se. Bookwi.se posts a free Christian Kindle books nearly every day and based on reader feedback, I will start posting occasionally about other free kindle books. Another option if you like Science Fiction or Fantasy is Baen.
Borrow from Your Library
Bookwi.se has a post about how to borrow books from the library. It is fairly easy, free, and most libraries are now participating. If you like audiobooks, borrowing from the library can help you get discounts on audiobooks from Audible.com
Borrow from other Kindle Users
Amazon got into the borrowing and lending of kindle books fairly late in the game. But they learned from others and made the process very easy. Here is a post about how to Borrow or Lend a book. Many people do not know a lot of other kindle owners, so Kindle book sharing sites popped up. Bookwi.se has reviewed two. Lendle and Booklending. I prefer Lendle, but it requires you to earn credits by offering up books to be loaned (most free books are lendable, so you can get some free books to build up some credits). Booklending allows you to borrow without lending, but does not have as many books. However, there is not a good reason to not check both sites if one site does not have a book you want to borrow.
There are also a number of smaller message boards that have their own lending systems. These require more work (no automatic matching of lender and borrower) but if you are an active member of the message board, that may be a good option for you.
Only about 30-40 percent of books are lendable, so many books you want, you will have to pay for.
Track the Price of Kindle Books
If you are like most Kindle owners, you will quickly accumulate more books than what you can read. But there will still be books that you want to buy, but they are priced higher than what you want to spend right now. This is where Ereaderiq comes in. This post shows you how to use Ereaderiq to create a wish-list and track the books you would like to buy, but are out of your price range. It also can track a list of books that are not currently available for Kindle and let you know when they are in Kindle format.
Image via CrunchBase
Audiobooks
One of the under-appreciated features of the Kindle is its integration with Audible.com. I have a somewhat dated (but still accurate) review of Audible.com. You can also borrow audiobooks from the library using either Overdrive or Netlibrary. MP3 audiobooks will play as audiobooks (if you put them in the Audible folder), but I have found that there is a lot of problems saving your place correctly with MP3 audiobooks and I tend to use my phone for MP3 audiobooks.
Import Books
Amazon is the easiest place to get Kindle books, but it is not the only place that you can get Kindle books. Baen, mentioned above, has a system set up to automatically email your books to your Kindle that works quite well. Other book stores allow you to download and then you can email or sideload (move the book over via USB cord from your computer. The most important issue if purchasing books from other sites is to determine the format and/or DRM. Amazon uses .mobi format. Most of the rest of the ebook world uses the .epub format. Both have their advantages, but they are not interchangeable. DRM is digital right management. I am not going to discuss DRM other than to say, do not buy books outside Amazon if they are not “DRM-Free”.
If they are DRM-Free, then you can convert them between the formats using the free software Calibre. Calibre will also help you maintain a digital library of your books you purchase outside of Amazon. (All of your books purchased from Amazon are maintained in Amazon’s cloud, so you don’t need to keep a outside library.)
The easiest thing to do, once the book is in the right format is to email it to your kindle. Each kindle has its own email address. If your book is in MS Word, HTML, Text or PDF format, you can also have Amazon convert for you by just putting “convert” in the subject line. Amazon will save emailed files for later download in the Archive (just like purchased books). So if you get a book from outside of Amazon, Amazon will still save your copy of it in your archive (up to 5GB for free.)
Discover New Books
I think one of the most important things to do as a reader is to learn about new books. Without some intentionality to it, you will end up reading the same authors or the same genres and never grow as a reader. I want to highlight a couple resources I use. First are the traditional book review magazines. I like Englewood Review of Books, a small independent magazine that started a couple years ago. Also I am a fan of Christianity Today’s Books and Culture magazine.
My favorite place to learn about new books is Goodreads, it is a social network for readers. Set up somewhat like Facebook, you can follow other people’s reviews or become ‘friends’ with others that you know or don’t know. I use goodreads to track all of the books I read and store up ideas for future books to read. I highly recommend it. Goodreads also has message boards and book discussions as well as a lot of book give aways.
There are also many, many small book review sites like Bookwi.se. Look around and find reviewers that you trust and branch out. You will not like everything. But if you loved every book you read, you would not really be branching out. You also need to give yourself permission to quit reading books that you do not like. There is some value in pushing through books that are difficult to read, but valuable. There is not a lot of value in pushing yourself to read books that you hate.
Get Questions Answered
If you have a question about your kindle, the best place to find answers are the message boards. There are three that I recommend. The best, in my opinion, is Kindleboards. It has been around for a long time and as a very knowledgeable and helpful group of people that can help answer questions, talk about books and it has very strong writers community if you are a writer.
Another board that is not exclusively kindle focused is MobileRead. I have not participated there as much lately, but it has a good developer community that works on hacks and ways to use an ebook reader that the manufactures did not intend. It can be very helpful.
The other big community is Amazon’s own message board system. I have never spend much time there, but I do use it to track free and reduced price books and I know that many people do use it as a regular message board.
Get an App
If you have a Kindle fire, then one of the first things you want to do is explore the Amazon App store. Every day Amazon give away a free app. Right after Christmas there will be a lot of very good apps for free. If you have an eink kindle (not a fire) there are still many good games, many of them for free.
Anything else?
If you have other questions or would like to suggest a Reading Tools post or something else to go here, leave a comment below and I will try to answer your question of find the answer somewhere if I do not now it.
One thing I do is any articles that I come across on the web I will send to my Kindle using Readability. I have it set up in my Chrome browser so that all I need to do is hit a button and it will format it and send it to my Kindle for reading later. It strips all the ads and extra stuff (e.g., links on the sides of blogs) and just leaves the text. It works great if you want to use your Kindle for articles.