Recently lamented that was being sunset. I suggested Kindle.

I was showing off the features I liked about Kindle when I realized that while I could send personal documents (PDF, MOBI) to my kindle devices (Kindle, iPad, iPhone), these personal documents were not showing up in. These apps only let me read kindle books I have purchased on Amazon.

This morning I got the following email from Amazon: Dear Kindle Customer, As a past user of personal documents on Kindle devices or reading apps, we are pleased to let you know about some improvements we ’ve made to how personal documents work. Personal documents are now in Amazon Cloud Drive: Starting today, all personal documents that you have archived in your Kindle Library will be available to access, delete, organize, and share from your Amazon Cloud Drive. You can see these documents in a new ”My Send-to-Kindle Docs ” folder alongside all of your saved content such as photos and personal videos. There is no action required on your part. Your personal documents features will continue to work just as they have in the past.

And as always, you can use to see a list of your documents, re-deliver them to Kindle devices and free reading apps, delete them, or turn off auto-saving of documents to the cloud. Documents will be delivered just as they have in the past and you will continue to have 5 GB of free cloud storage for your personal documents. Just ”Send Once, Read Everywhere. ” Documents stored in their native format: Also starting today, new documents that you save to the cloud with Send to Kindle will be stored in their native format (e.g. MS Word, TXT) so you can access them anywhere from Amazon Cloud Drive. Please note: Your usage of Amazon Cloud Drive is subject to the.

Sincerely, The Docs Team To learn more about sending documents, news, blogs, and other web articles to your Kindle, please visit To learn more about Amazon Cloud Drive features and apps, please visit I learned a number of things from this email. First, I didn ’t even know there was an that essentially works like, etc. So I installed it. What ’s one more? After installing it, I had a cloud drive folder and it synced some MP3 ’s I had purchased from Amazon in the past. It also created a folder that contained all my personal docs I had syned to my kindle devices. Still, I didn ’t see a way to automatically see these docs in my Kindle for Mac app.

Fortunately, I found an easy hack to make it work. How to sync personal kindle docs with your local kindle app In the Kindle for Mac app, you can set your content folder in your preferences. Just set this to the Amazon Cloud Drive folder that contains all your personal Kindle docs. Still, I don ’t think it will sync furthest location read between devices.

Hopefully this is addressed at some point. Sending personal docs to kindle The other thing I learned is that there are easier ways to send personal documents to kindle. While the email message is nice, it is not ideal. I downloaded the that lets you simply drag & drop a file. It will even try to convert PDF files to Kindle files.

Amazon Kindle For Mac Update

I ’m not sure how well it works though. Good job Kindle & Docs teams. Keep up the good work!

Got a new Amazon Kindle for Christmas and I love it. I’m supposed to be able to plug it into my Mac and access the files — and more importantly copy some of my music and photos onto the device.

But I plug in my Amazon Kindle Fire and the Mac system sees nothing. No device, not even an error message. Congrats on what sounds like a very nice present: the Amazon Kindle Fire HD and Fire 8 are very nice tablets with vivid color screens and, of course, tight integration with the Amazon experience, both books through Kindle and shopping through the various Amazon apps you can download. Under the hood, it turns out that your Kindle is running a custom version of Android, the same operating system that powers Samsung Galaxy S6 smartphones and LG wearables, televisions and much more.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that Apple doesn’t seem to be much of a fan of the Google-created Android operating system and while you can plug in a Windows hard drive and have it show up on your Mac system without fuss, Android requires that you actually download a new program and use that to access Android-based devices when hooked up to a Mac OS X system, even in 10.11 El Capitan. Let me show you the steps as it’s pretty easy once you know where to grab the app. First off, here’s my Finder window with an Amazon Kindle Fire 8 HD plugged in to my MacBook Pro: Lots of files, folders, devices, etc. But no Kindle device. To get that, you’ll need to get a program called Android File Transfer and install it. Interestingly, it’s not available in the App Store either, so you’ll have to go old school and download it yourself.

The link you need is at or you can just click on this graphic: Once it’s downloaded, you’ll have a new device on your Desktop. Double-click to open it and this is what you’ll see: This is the easy app installation process on the Mac: Just click and drag the Android File Transfer program icon onto the Applications icon and it’ll be installed on your computer in, yes, your Applications folder.

Once done, it might launch (or you can launch it directly from Applications), but without an Android device like the Kindle plugged in, all you’ll get is this: No worries, because when you do now plug in your Kindle Fire, it’ll show up with a Finder-like window within the Android File Transfer app: At this point it’s super easy to dig around, find the folders you want (like “Movies” or “Pictures”) then either copy files off the Kindle Fire by dragging them onto your Desktop, or copy them onto the Kindle by dragging them from your Mac system to the appropriate folder or sub-folder. Not as elegant as it could be — I think Amazon could write a custom Kindle-themed program for the Mac that works atop this relatively crude solution, and Apple could just add support for Android file systems in the OS — but with a little bit of poking around, you’ll get the hang of it! And enjoy your Kindle Fire!