imagePerhaps I’m a little slow and everyone else knew this already, but I recently had the time to look into managing my Kindle devices and applications. I found there are a number of useful things you can do to help keep them straight, and to make it easier to email documents to yourself on them.

For starters, there’s the Amazon device and app management window, which you should be able to reach by clicking here, logging into Amazon, and then clicking the “Devices” tab at the top, between “Content” and “Settings.” This screen will list all the Kindle devices and Amazon applications (both Kindle and Audible) that you have, including e-ink readers and apps on your PCs, smartphones, and tablets. It will also let you edit them, including changing their names and their mail-to-Kindle email addresses.

This is particularly useful if you’re using the “Send to Kindle” option on Android, which will let you select by name which device you want the e-book sent to. It would be helpful if they all had meaningful names—and here’s your chance to set those names.

The one problem with this approach is that when you install the Kindle app into multiple devices at once, you end up with names like “Robotech_Master’s Android Device,” or “Robotech_Master’s Second Android Device,” or third, fourth, etc. If you’ve already installed Kindle and/or Audible onto multiple Android devices and have no idea which is which, you’ll have to go into the Android devices themselves to sort that out. If you launch the Amazon or Audible app and go to the “hamburger” (the three horizontal lines at the top left), there’s a “Settings” option which will let you see what name that app is currently using, and you can even change it right from there. It’s a lot more useful when my apps are named things like “Moto X” or “Nexus 7”.

Another useful feature of the Amazon device management screen is that you can change the email addresses associated with your devices. By default, they’re your account prefix and then a number, at kindle.com. For example, robotech_23@kindle.com, robotech37@kindle.com, etc. I found it a lot more useful if I changed them to something more unique and easy to remember what’s what. For example, my Kindle Paperwhite became robotech_pw@kindle.com, my Moto X robotech_mx@kindle.com, and so on. (I can mention them here because it doesn’t matter whether you or a spammer emails something to them; only whitelisted addresses will get through. You can manage the whitelist in the “Settings” tab at the top of the app management window.)

It makes a considerable difference whether you can email something to yourself to be able to remember what your mail-to-Kindle e-mail address actually is on the spur of the moment. I suspect I’m going to be using this function a lot more often now.

3 COMMENTS

  1. Something to keep in mind when renaming Kindles and Kindle apps is that the one that’s first, alphabetically, will be the default device when you buy a new book on Amazon. That is, “Zeke’s Kindle” would most likely be last. You can always prepend an extra character to make “aZeke’s Kindle”. or “1Zeke’s Kindle”.if you want it to be the default.

  2. Actually, in that same device management screen on Amazon’s web site, you can select the device you want to be your default device and click the “Set as default device” link right below it. No creative renaming necessary.

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