One of my favorite things about writing DocumentSnap is interacting with all the awesome readers. You all do such interesting things.
One such reader is Clare Kumar from Streamlife. Clare is a Professional Organizer, which in itself isn’t too unusual for DocumentSnap readers, but she is also the Organizing Expert for the Marilyn Denis Show, a lifestyle and talk show up here in Canada[1].
Recently Clare was on the show talking about paper organization. Although I go on and on about paperless stuff here on the site, having your physical paper organized can be just as important. Your paperless workflow will go much more smoothly if your paper is in control.
She has some good tips for paper workflow, and some interesting products in her shopping guide. In particular, the Swingline Stack & Shred Shredder looks pretty cool. Apparently it comes in a 60 sheet version too.
Having your PDF documents with you on the go can be extremely handy, and a growing way to do that is with a tablet. However, when I say tablet, I am not just talking about the usual suspects like the iPad, Android, or even the new Kindle Fire. Many people don’t realize that you can store and view PDF documents on a normal Kindle as well.
I picked up a Kindle 4 a few months ago, and while it has been fantastic for reading books, I wanted to see how it does with PDFs.
I’ll be using this Kindle in the examples below, but I believe the workflow is similar for most recent E Ink Kindles.
But First, A Note
I don’t want to give the impression that the E Ink Kindle is as good as, say, an iPad. For starters, there is only 1.25 GB available for user content. Additionally, the screen is not color[1], so your PDFs are not going to look as nice as on an iPad.
There are no “apps” in the modern sense of the word, so you are limited to the Kindle’s built-in ability to display PDFs, and finally, the screen is only 6", so you may need to do some zooming if you want to read a PDF closely.
Having said all that, PDF display works surprisingly well on the 6" E Ink Kindle 4, and the documents are very readable. The device is extremely light, and many people carry the Kindle with them anyways. Why not use it for going paperless?
There are two main ways to get your PDFs on the device:
Connect via USB
Send via Email
Copy PDFs To Kindle Via USB
The Kindle comes with a USB cable that is used for charging, but it can also be used to copy content over to the device. When I plug the Kindle into my computer, it mounts it as a drive[2].
Kindle Drive Mounted
The magic happens in the documents folder. In the Finder, take a PDF and drag it to that folder.
PDF In Kindle Documents Folder
When you eject the Kindle from your computer, you should now see the PDF on the device.
Kindle PDF in List
You can view the PDF like any normal Kindle book, and it will display on the screen.
Kindle Display PDF on Screen
I am not sure if you can tell in this screenshot, but this PDF looks a bit faint on the Kindle screen. I chose that on purpose, and we’ll get into that in a bit.
Email PDFs To Kindle
Amazon has a great service whereby you can email documents to your Kindle’s email address (did you know it had one?), and the documents will appear on your device.
Find Your Kindle’s Email Address
The first thing you want to do is find your Kindle’s address. To do that, from the home screen, hit the Menu button, then choose Settings, then hit the next page button on the side.
You’ll see your Send-to-Kindle email address.
Send To Kindle Address
Note: Before you go crazy sending documents to yourself, you need to be careful of Amazon’s charges.
If you have a 3G Kindle and download your PDFs to your device over 3G, you will want to see Amazon’s Personal Document Fees. If you download over wi-fi, it is free.
To be safe, you will want to use the @free.kindle.com address. Let’s say your Kindle’s address is [email protected]. If you send your documents to [email protected], it will only transfer them if you are connected to wi-fi, and you don’t have to worry about getting nailed with fees.
Make Sure You Are An Approved Sender
If your email address that you will send documents to is the same as your Amazon account, you can skip this step. If you are like me and have different addresses, you need to add your address as an approved Sender.
Go to Amazon.com
Click on Your Account at the top
Click on Manage Your Kindle under Digital Content
Click on Personal Document Settings on the left
Add yourself under Approved Personal Document E-mail List
Add Approved Kindle Address
Email Your Documents To Your Kindle
You can either attach PDFs directly to an email, or zip up a group of them and attach the zip file.
Don’t forget, if you are on 3G, make sure to send to your @free.kindle.com account to avoid nasty bills.
Email To Kindle
When you are connected to wi-fi, your document will appear on your Kindle ready to view.
Kindle Emailed PDF
If you have a long PDF that you want to read, you may find it nicer to have Amazon convert the PDF into the Kindle’s native format. Then it will be just like reading a normal Kindle book.
To do that, when you email the PDF in, put the word convert in the subject line. Amazon’s servers will then convert it to Kindle format before sending it to your device.
For more than you could possibly want to know about getting personal content onto your Kindle, check out Amazon’s help page.
Improving Reading
When you view a PDF on screen, it may be too faint or small to read. Hit the Menu button on the Kindle and then choose Zoom & Contrast. You can adjust the contrast to make the text darker, and adjust the zoom so that you can read it more comfortably.
Adjust Kindle Zoom and Contrast
Organize PDFs
The Kindle doesn’t have the concept of folders, but it does have Collections.
Amazon does a much more thorough job of going through this than I could, so check out their Organizing Your Kindle Content help page.
Searching
If your PDF is searchable, searching within the PDF does work.[3] Unfortunately, it does not appear that PDF files are included in the system-wide Kindle search. Too bad.
Conclusion
All-in-all, I was pleasantly surprised by my 6" Kindle’s ability as a PDF reader. I wouldn’t want to give up my iPad for it, but if I didn’t have one, it is a nice alternative. For $79 USD[4], it is pretty hard to beat.
Do you use your Kindle or other e-reader to store and read PDFs? Any tricks or workflows that I have missed? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.
This is Day 12 in a 12 Day series: 12 Days Of Paperless Gifts. If you know someone who could use some help going paperless, or if you deserve to treat yourself, this is the place. If you don’t, feel free to ignore this series. Normal DocumentSnap posts will still be coming!
OK, so you are probably in trouble if you want to buy someone something by now. It’s time to resort to gift cards.
Perhaps “resort” is not the best word, because some people (myself included) actually prefer to get gift cards. To me, it is a complete win-win.
If you’re in the United States or country with Amazon.com, a good choice is an Amazon gift certificate.
That way, they have a bunch of stuff to choose from (see many of the previous items in the 12 Days series), and you are saved the stress.
This is Day 11 in a 12 Day series: 12 Days Of Paperless Gifts. If you know someone who could use some help going paperless, or if you deserve to treat yourself, this is the place. If you don’t, feel free to ignore this series. Normal DocumentSnap posts will still be coming!
There are some people who are more in the “holiday card” category than the “buy a present” category. We can be honest about that, right?
Being a paperless person, this can present a bit of a problem. You may not want to mail a paper card, but you remember what a complete disaster old-school electronic cards were. The ads! The pop-ups! The terribly-animated falling snow! The horrible music!
What I usually do is use Paperless Post, which actually has classy e-cards. If you want to be paperless and not scare or insult your recipients, it is worth checking out.
When you have old, important documents in your family, it can be hard to know what to do with them. You want to digitize them, you want to preserve them, but you don’t want to mess them up.
He has been going through and digitizing the letters and photos from his grandfather, a WWII veteran.
People know me as someone who lives in a paperless office, and enjoys a paperless lifestyle, in fact I don’t own a printer. So you might be asking, why I have held onto this particular paper. My grandfather’s letters from the war tell a profound story. He was part of the invasion of France, liberated Paris, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, freed Belgium, and smashed the Eagle’s Nest. That would make a great movie, right? Correct, and HBO turned his division’s story into ‘Band of Brothers’. I had heard some of this growing up, but now digging into his letters; it became totally real and personal for me.
Like him, I would have been pretty nervous the first time I fed one of those letters into the document feeder of the scanner, but it looks like the Canon DR-C125 that he used was up to the job.
If you read the post, don’t miss the comments on the bottom, where they go into an interesting discussion of preserving documents vs. just making them accessible. Just because you digitize something doesn’t mean you don’t need to take steps to preserve the paper, too.
Have you done any projects preserving your family history? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.
This is Day 9 in a 12 Day series: 12 Days Of Paperless Gifts. If you know someone who could use some help going paperless, or if you deserve to treat yourself, this is the place. If you don’t, feel free to ignore this series. Normal DocumentSnap posts will still be coming!
When tablet computers were first announced, many people were wondering what on earth they’d be used for.
It turns out, one really great use case is to read your paperless documents, and to be able to bring them up as-needed.
The iPad is the 8,000 pound gorilla in the space, but it is not the only option:
Carrying on with this week’s apparent theme of paperless genealogy, it is great to have your genealogy records scanned and in digital format, but it is even better to not have them in paper form in the first place.
I came across this great research trip report by Linda McCauley: The Paperless Research Trip Was Succesful. It’s a great writeup of the methods and tools that she used to research family records.
I started last Monday morning in the Probate Clerk’s Office in the Whitfield County, Georgia courthouse with my Android Tablet, Wand Scanner and Android Phone (used to take the photo below). Over three days, I also researched at the Whitfield-Murray Historical Society and the Murray County courthouse. I did not print one piece of paper. I did not write a word on a piece of paper. I copied everything with either the wand scanner or an app on my phone and typed all notes into Evernote on the tablet.
It may surprise you since I have a reputation for being a bit of an Apple fanboi, but one thing I like about this post, other than the paperlessosity, is that all this is done without a single piece of Apple technology. It’s a nice reminder that yes, you can actually get stuff done with Android in general and Android tablets specifically.
Are you into genealogy? Any tricks for doing research without using paper? Let’s hear it in the comments.
Three years ago, my wife and I were going through a “simplify our lives” phase and decided to move from our one-hundred year old 3,000 square-foot house to a new(ish) 1,600 square-foot townhouse.[1]
When you make a move like that, you quickly learn to maximize space as much as possible. Since making the move, I’ve always been interested in how others deal with small spaces.[2]
To that end, this forum thread on Unclutterer caught my attention. It is all about being moved from an office to a small cubicle. Similar to our house move, having to move to a smaller workspace can be quite a disruption, especially when it has to be done in a hurry.
There are a number of great tips in the thread, but I like this one from herisff:
Cut down the office supplies in your area, and only keep the records you must in your cubicle. I’m a big believer in using a space for awhile before purchasing organizers, so I suggest making do for a few days with what you have.
Any time you are looking to make a large change, I find that it can help to shape your workflow to how you actually do things, rather than trying to force yourself to do something that doesn’t fit.
Sort of like the (possibly apocryphal) stories of universities adding sidewalks after they see where students walk.
Have you ever had to go through a space downsizing? How did it go?
Many people who want to go paperless (myself included) want to have their documents stored online so that they can access their information in the cloud.
There are, of course, security considerations when doing this. One more the more insightful articles I have read on this topic was written on The Economist’s Babbage blog this Spring after Dropbox’s well-publicized security woes.
The article is called Keys to the cloud castle, and it is a great overview of the security implications of keeping your sensitive information in the cloud, some options that you have, and and a good plain-English description of the issues.
Even better, it stresses the need for users to be educated on the topic.
What the revelations, complaints, accusations and responses have demonstrated is the need for better education about which set of encryption and security choices are most appropriate for what sort of data. The average user simply does not know what he is letting himself in for, or how to gauge the risks involved.
If you want to be educated (and I recommend that you do), I recommend checking out the article.
Being a technical person, sometimes I tend to jump into implementing a solution to a problem right away. If it is a very small project that approach can work, but I have learned[1] that it can be smart to take a step back and plan out what you are going to do before starting. Crazy talk, I know.
I came across this post by Bill Good: 12 Steps To Near-Paperless Bliss: Part I and in it he makes the case that you should outline both the process for what you are going to do, and the goals for what you want the end result to look like.
In six weeks, those 40 cabinets will be gone, their paper files converted to easily accessible PDF files. Why six weeks? We’re moving and I’m not going to pay thousands of dollars a year to store all that … ‘er … stuff.And we will do it with two $500 scanners!
I am not sure if Bill made his October 21 due date[2], but I really like how he outlined and described both the process and the goals. Well worth it if you are going to be starting a paperless project of a decent size.
Join the forum discussion on this post
This is Day 12 in a 12 Day series: 
