HOW TO: Get Started With Your New Amazon Kindle

This post is part of the
Mashable 10, Mashable’s gift guide of the 10 hottest gadgets that our editors think should be on everyone’s wish lists this holiday season. If you were lucky enough to receive one of those gifts, our handy
quick start guides should get you up and running. To view the entire gift guide, click
here.

So you got (or have a pretty good idea you’re
going to receive) a Kindle 3 this holiday season. Congratulations.

Now it’s time to begin taking advantage of your device, courtesy of our handy little guide below.

Get Free E-Books

Assuming you’re like me, the first thing you’ll want to do is load your device with as many free books as possible. Amazon offers thousands of free e-books in the Kindle Store, which are divided into two sections:
popular classics and rotating,
limited-time offers.

There are a number of other resources for free e-books outside of the Kindle Store as well. Collectively, millions of titles are available through
Project Gutenberg, the
Internet Archive (mainly historical items useful for academic work),
Open Library,
ManyBooks.net,
LibriVox (audiobooks),
Fictionwise,
Bookyards and
Planet eBook. In most cases, you’ll need to download the e-books and transfer them to your Kindle using a USB cable. For more information, see
here.

In addition, you can port any of your PDF files for reading on your Kindle device, as well as access hundreds of thousands of other (and more contemporary) titles in the Kindle Store, usually priced at $9.99 or less.

Subscribe to Your Favorite Periodicals

Subscriptions to many
newspapers,
magazines and
blogs (like
ours) are available on the Kindle. Each comes with a 14-day free trial subscription and is delivered automatically as updates are released.

Accessorize

There are dozens of covers and other accessories designed to protect your device and enhance your reading experience.

Of all the covers I’ve seen for the Kindle 3, Amazon’s $60
lighted leather cover is my favorite. It’s slim, lightweight, is available in seven different colors and, most importantly, comes with a built-in light that adds little weight and almost no bulk.

For those of you willing to sacrifice a little functionality for some hand craftsmanship, DODOcase’s $50 to $55
Kindle 3 covers (pictured right) are a good choice. They resemble a hardback moleskin on the outside and come with a range of colors on the inside. Unfortunately, they don’t come with a light (something I use often), though they are somewhat lighter than Amazon’s leather covers.

Read Your Kindle Books Anywhere

It’s likely that you won’t always have your Kindle device with you, which is why it’s important to make sure you can access your reading material on as many devices as possible.

Amazon offers a number of
free reading apps for the desktop (
Mac and
Windows PC), as well as
iPhone [iTunes link],
iPad [iTunes link], Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 smartphones. As long as you have a 3G or Internet connection on your devices, you’ll be able to automatically sync where you last left off in a book, as well as your notes and highlights.

Other Tips

Although I don’t personally use my Kindle for much beyond novel reading, there’s plenty of other things you can do with the device. You can download dozens of
word, puzzle and crossword games, many of which are available for free, listen to MP3 files, browse the web (warning: the browser is extremely elementary), look up words in the dictionary and on Wikipedia, have books read to you, and later this year,
lend books to others for 14-day periods.

Have additional recommendations for new Kindle owners? Please share them in the comments below.

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Image courtesy of
iStockphoto,
3dgoksu

Additional images courtesy of Flickr,
kodomut and
johncatral.

HOW TO: Get Started With Your New Amazon Kindle