Kindle - can I get Amazon.com books in the UK?

[stillfrazzled]

The US site has some really good titles on the free list, including one I've been itching to read for ages.

Is there any way to access these from the UK?

According to what I've read on the kindle forum on Amazon no you can't. However before I got my kindle I had a kindle app on my phone and I definetly used to get amazon.com books sent to it, paid for ones though. Not tried it recently and never tried the free books.

I have multiple addresses saved, including a fictitious US one. If I want to buy a book that's only available on amazon.com, I go into Manage My Kindle and change the address to the US one. They transfer your account to the US site and you can buy from there. Then I do the process in reverse and your account gets transferred back to the UK site. Dunno how long I will get away with this but it's a PITA when books aren't available here!

I only get the free books because, well I'm tight, really. I have an account with a US address (I just googled an american university and used that address). Then you register your kindle against that address on Amazon. Job done.

Oooh, so I could make up/find a US address and switch back and forth? And of course I won't ever need anything posted...

Honestly, MN is the best. I spent AGES looking up this question on Google, why did I bother?

Now, how do you avoid RSI on Kindles?

I 'stole' a friend's NY address/zip code but changed the number to a non-existant one. It doesn't matter because nothing will ever get posted there.

I suppose to avoid RSI you'd have to actually put the thing down for a minute here or there, but I haven't managed yet so I can't help you with that.

They have free games on the US site too

Heh, after one day of owning the thing I can see what you mean .

Have already downloaded loads of free stuff, and found a few PDF book collections I have my eye on. Are PDFs OK to read on Kindle?

I also need a nice case for it... am literally obsessed at the moment!

Yes, you can use calibre (an awesome free ebook management program) to convert PDFs and send them to your kindle or you can email them as an attachment to your email (make sure you use your @free.kindle.com email address or they will charge you!) with 'convert' in th subject and it will format it for kindle reading.

Don't forget you can download free classics from Project Gutenberg - you want the .mobi format, although again calibre will convert into any format you want.

Calibre can also download newspapers automatically and send them to your kindle every morning for free! (Not a calibre employee, I swear, it's just excellent).

I have just downloaded Calibre, didn't realise you could use it on PDFs. Excellent. Change to Mobi format, I think?

I love Gutenberg already, didn't know about the newspapers. This is getting more exciting by the minute...

Yep, convert it all to .mobi format. I have had problems with large PDFs where they convert fine but are too large to email. You can still use the USB cable to transfer them, though.

I was thinking of doing that and making absolutely sure that I don't get charged.

Which Kindle do you have?

OK, I have calibre. I've told it to download the newspaper every morning - what do I need to do to get it to send it to my Kindle as I can't see anything about this?

Go into Preferences -> Sharing books by email. Add your @free.kindle.com email address and make sure autosend is ticked. You will need to fill in an email address and password to send email from - if you have gmail it will autofill for you (this email address needs to be authorised to send things to your kindle in the Amazon Manage My Kindle section). Once this is set up it should automatically send you the downloaded news, and whenever you add new books you can go to connect/share and email them to your kindle without using the USB lead.

Calibre must be running to send stuff, though - so if, like me, you want the newspapers delivered to your kindle for when you wake up, you need to leave your PC on overnight. If it's not on, it'll send them when you boot it up later.

Stillfrazzled, I got a Kindle 3 3G version. Not sure I'll use the 3G much as I have an iPhone but it's free to use even abroad, which is pretty cool.

Thanks BadgerMonkey, thats really useful.