ScanSnap Meets The Kindle - My Head Explodes

ScanSnap Meets The Kindle – My Head Explodes

The Fujitsu ScanSnap and the Amazon Kindle are two devices that lots and lots of people love. What happens when they are used together? Lots and lots of happiness!

Over at the ScanSnap Community site, Megan Fowler did a post outlining how she used her ScanSnap S1500 to scan documents in to her Kindle DX prior to a long flight.

Recently, I went on a family vacation that involved a plane ride to our destination. During our five hour plane ride in coach, I did not want to deplete my laptop battery trying to read various articles and business documents that I didn’t get around to reviewing prior to leaving. My laptop battery was better served as movie entertainment for my three young boys during the flight. Traveling light is a must when we travel, therefore carrying around a ½ ream of paper of reading materials is not an option. My solution was to load my Kindle DX full of scans of various articles I had clipped from magazines, white papers my boss had handed me to read, details of various sightseeing places I wanted to visit and our favorite family recipes to make during our vacation.

For your Kindle users out there, of which I am unfortunately not one, have you scanned PDFs in to your Kindle? How about the Kindle 1 or Kindle 2?

About the Author

Brooks Duncan helps individuals and small businesses go paperless. He's been an accountant, a software developer, a manager in a very large corporation, and has run DocumentSnap since 2008. You can find Brooks on Twitter at @documentsnap or @brooksduncan. Thanks for stopping by.

Leave a Reply 5 comments

braincutlery - January 5, 2013 Reply

My job requires me to read some hefty pieces of legislation, so I have in the past scanned or uploaded PDFs to my Kindle to enable me to pore through the documents on the move (i.e. on the train).

However the PDF rendering isn't great and you tend to end up with something tiny (at least on my Kindle 3). It lead me to the conclusion that the Kindle is great for reading documents designed for Kindle, but little else.

My recommendation would be to scan to something like Evernote offline folders, or perhaps Pocket. You can then peruse your articles/websites/documents etc much more intuitively on your laptop, tablet or smartphone.

BangkokTeacher - November 14, 2011 Reply

I have a Sony Reader, and I am currently a university student (Education) on a practicum in Thailand. For my courses I get a lot of PDFs, so I put everything on my reader and save myself a lot of space and headache. I can also carry all my personal reading on there as well. My boyfriend is an Evernote addict with an iPod touch so he does all his reading on there, but this is a great solution for me. I've even been able to get a couple of texts as .pdfs, which is excellent – saves so much space.

    Brooks Duncan - November 14, 2011 Reply

    Awesome thanks! Hadn't heard of using the Sony Reader so that is great. Good luck on your practicum.

Esta Dear - September 29, 2010 Reply

The Kindle 2 looks like a big improvement on the first generation kindle book reader. Agree would make a great christmas gift.

ktber - January 11, 2010 Reply

I have used PDFs on my Kindle 2, but the print size is tiny, because the whole page is shrunk to fit on the Kindle screen. This could work once in a while but not on a day to day basis. However, the process was easy.

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