When downloading free books from non-Amazon sites, you have a couple of options. If you have WinZip or a similar product, using the .ZIP download format is the quickest way to get the file down to your computer–fewest clicks and decisions. If you don’t have any program on your computer that can deal with .ZIP files, you can download the other formats are available.

Some HTML and .Plain Text links will open the books’ content in a new window. From there you will have to save the book to a location on your hard drive. .MOBI, .EPUB, .LIT and .PDF versions will prompt you to save the book or open it in the appropriate program. There are also some additional file formats available on other sites, but the above seem to be the main file formats. (Note that Amazon will NOT convert all formats. For a list of Amazon convertible formats, see here.)

Once you have the book on your computer, you can either convert it yourself, or email to Amazon for conversion to be delivered wirelessly and emailed back to you in the proper Kindle format. Conversion instructions for MobiPocket Creator and Calibre available on this site.

Upload a Book To Your Kindle

Manually

To upload a book from your pc to your Kindle. This assumes you are using Windows. This is the method you use if you have converted books yourself or sent to Amazon via using the free conversion.

Connect the Kindle to your PC

Turn the Kindle on and connect to your pc via the USB. A successful connection will update the Kindle screen with a USB icon and “Your Kindle is in USB mode….” message.

Your pc may popup a window that shows various file folders. The folder for Kindle BOOKS is the documents folder. If you do not get the popup window, don’t worry, we’ll get back to it.

Locate the Books on PC

In Windows Explorer, open the location on your pc where you downloaded or saved your conversion file for the books.

Copy to Kindle

Highlight your books and from the Edit menu select ‘Copy to Folder’. In the Copy Items Window that pops up, use the scroll on the right to go to the top of the window. Click on the minus sign to the left of My Documents to collapse the tree. You should now see a list of drives on your pc. One will be labled Kindle followed by a drive letter [Kindle (F:)]. Click the plus sign to the left of Kindle to expand it’s tree. Click on documents, then click the Copy button.

Via Wireless

This is almost too easy! Just email the document as an attachment to your Kindle’s email address. The document will be downloaded via WhisperNet. You have two options on email. Send to your Kindle using Kind...@kindle.com. Amazon may charge $ .10 per attachment. (Note: These documents are supposed to show up under Personal Docs but currently are listed under Books due to a bug. When I reported it, Amazon told me they would contact me when fixed.).

Blogs and Feeds

You have a few choices on how your blogs and/or feeds are delivered to your Kindle. The methods below can be used with the Kindle 1 or Kindle 2. All of the below options utilize wireless delivery. My personal favorite is Feedbooks as I can update my content when I want and just delete the previous file (Kindle 2 makes this much, much easier).  You can use the link in the sidebar to get this blog on your Kindle as an example