Amazon has two new services that may be of interest to Kindle users.
First. you now can store up to 5 gigabytes of documents using your Kindle account. You may have already sent pdfs to be read on the Kindle, but this is an expanded version of the service. I wonder if this is response to the added capacity offered by Google.
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 Manage Your Kindle 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.”
I also noticed a message indicating that I set whether I want automatic updates to my Kindle books. As a Kindle author of what I consider a textbook, I think this is a great feature and a service not available through traditional publishers. I can update the book when appropriate and offer students access to more current content. This is a significant limitation of traditional publishers who tend to consider updates every 3 years or so. If you are a Kindle user, sign in to your Amazon account and you should note a link allowing you to turn updates on (or leave it off if you want).
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.