Stanza, My Kindle’s Best Friend

Gadgets | Resources
August 13, 2009

So I finally did it, I got a Kindle.  A used one mind you, but that doesn’t bother me.  I’ve only had it a few hours now, so I’m sure that I will still learn lots of little things about it.  But the first big hurdle I came to was getting documents I already have on to it.  Sure it’s super easy to download new books, or even try out sample chapters.  I’ve even collected a few free ones that I’ve found in the links to over the last few months that I’ve been reading on the iPhone app, but what about other documents I have that I would like to take with me.

I’ve been a ebook fan for a long time going back to the small library I have from my Microsoft Reader days on my old iPaq. Now I would love to be able to read some of these again on the Kindle.  I know I could email them to my Kindle, but don’t really want to pay amazon for the conversion, and I was happy to find there’s a really easy way.

There’s a free piece of software called Stanza (both Windows and Mac versions available), and it will open almost any text document you have (including the old .lit files from my iPaq) and convert them to a number of different ebook formats, including Kindle.

Here’s how to do it.

  1. Plug in your Kindle to your computer via USB and let the computer mount it as a drive
  2. Open stanza and select the file you wish to convert for your Kindle
  3. From the file menu select export as and choose Kindle as the output.  Choose the document folder on the kindle as the save location
  4. Disconnect the Kindle and now the document shows up as a library item.

You may be thinking this is a great way to get ebooks and other documents on your iPhone into the Kindle App as well, but you can’t access the kindle library the same way on the iPhone.  Never fear, Stanza has a free iPhone App as well that you can share books between your computer and phone or ipod.  It’s a great way to transfer documents to your phone for reference, or maybe even your teaching notes for Youth Group. This app is so great, it really deserves it’s own post, but I’ve got some reading to do.

1 Comment

  1. Brandon
    Brandon on August 14, 2009 at 1:36 am

    This sounds awesome…I will play with it tomorrow. I have been looking for a quick and easy converter. I have been use 2 different free converters…one is through Amazon.

    To pay for 10 cent delivery “name”@kindle.com or to upload via USB or SD card I just sent it to “name”@free.kindle.com and it bounces back to my email so I download it and upload it.

    The second is Mobipocket
    http://www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSoft/ProductDetailsCreator.asp
    It seems pretty robust but I only use it as a converter.

    Reply

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