Why should I provide my email address?

Start saving money today with our FREE daily newsletter packed with the best FREE and bargain Kindle book deals. We will never share your email address!
Sign Up Now!

From the Kindle Nation Mailbag: How to eMail Passages from a Kindle Book

Thanks to longtime Kindle Nation citizen John T. for sending in this question that I don’t think we have addressed before:

Hi Stephen,

Have not written you for awhile. I am the one who back in 2009 suggested you put up a donation button, and started you out with 100.00.  You did the donation area within a few days of that. Time passes.

Quick question. My wife has a couple bibles downloaded on her kindle.  Is there any way she can email passages out of the clip area of her verses, and for that fact any clip or page?

Thank you in advance,

John T.

Hi John, thanks for being in touch again, and thanks again for suggesting that PayPal button way back in the early days of Kindle Nation. It took us a while to really figure out how to make use of it in a way that didn’t just involve begging, but it was that PayPal button that got us started on the author sponsorships, which have allowed us to continue to transform and build Kindle Nation and even to hire a team to come up with cool features like the new free book tool.

Anyway, on your question, I’ve got good news. There are various other things that you can do that allow you to share passages with friends and contacts via social media like Facebook and Twitter, but that’s not what you asked. The answer to what you asked is:

Yes, you can clip passages from any Kindle book, save them to your My Clippings file, then download that file to a simple .TXT file on your computer so that you can edit it and email any or all of it. (I’ll trust that neither you nor your wife will violate anyone’s copyright while making use of this feature.)

Any time you have saved clippings while reading on your Kindle, your Kindle automatically creates a My Clippings file which gathers together all such clippings. To see that file, just connect your Kindle to your computer using your USB cable, transfer the file to your computer’s desktop or hard drive, and open it with your Text Editor, Word, or even Google Docs. Once you open the file you can do whatever you want with the text, move it to a “commonplace book” or another file where you might be saving certain kinds of passages, and send it via email either by attaching it or pasting it into an email.

Hope that helps, John!

From the Kindle Nation Mailbag: Saving & Highlighting Blog Posts on Your Kindle for Future Reference

As mentioned in a previous post, Kindle Nation citizen Paul D wrote in to ask why he couldn’t bookmark, highlight, or search within a post or passage from a Kindle blog the way one can with a passage or phrase from a Kindle book.

Alas, these features are unfortunately blocked with Kindle blogs, but here are several alternatives worth noting.

Clip, Keep and Work With a Blog 

While reading a blog on your Kindle, just press the “Menu” button and select “Clip this article.” The entire post that you are reading at the time will be saved to your Kindle’s “My Clippings” file, a text file that you can find and open from your Home screen. You can also access the same “My Clippings” file from your computer by connecting your Kindle via USB and saving the file to your computer as a TXT file. Then, once you open it, you have the option of cutting and pasting the article or post or any passage from it and sending the saved file to your you@kindle.com or you@free.kindle.com so that Amazon will convert it for reading on your Kindle.

Transfer Blog Posts to Your Kindle for PC App

Although the Kindle edition of a blog works as a kind of revolving fund of recent posts and disposes of older posts on a regular basis, Kindle owners who subscribe to a Kindle blog also have the option of sending a blog to your PC through your Kindle for PC App and saving it their on your Kindle for PC Home screen so that it won’t be wiped out by new posts. Here’s a post that explains the process. I haven’t tried to reverse-engineer the process by transferring such a historic blog-slice back to my Kindle, and my concern about that process is that it might affect the Kindle platform’s capacity to send me daily updates of the blog in question. I’m hoping this same functionality will soon extend to the Mac via the Kindle for Mac app that is coming “soon.”

Save the Online Version of a Post to Your Kindle with Instapaper

Finally, whenever you find any blog post or periodical article online and you feel it’s a keeper, you can use Instapaper to send it directly to your Kindle for future reference.  Just go to Instapaper.com, sign up for a free account, and link your account to your Kindle via your you@kindle.com email address. Grab the “Read Here” button, stick it on your browser’s toolbar and you are ready to go. Wherever you surf on the web all day long, you can click that “Read Here” link and content that you select will be sent to your Kindle, in a reader-friendly digest file that will be easy to identify on your Home screen, whenever you want: on demand, once a day, or once a week.