Fundamentally the “Send to Kindle” software adds a “Send to Kindle” option to the Windows context menu in Explorer when you right-click on one or multiple files (I know, that’s what I thought too!)  At its most basic this is just what it does.  There are few other features however that make it a little more useful than a way to get files and eBooks onto your device a second or two more quickly than normal.

One of these is that the Kindle doesn’t need to be physically connected to your PC when you do it.  The files will be synchronised with your Kindle Cloud and downloaded the next time the Kindle is on with WiFi activated.  This means that if you don’t have your Kindle handy when you realise there’s a useful file you’d like on it, this isn’t a barrier.

The other way it is useful is with a “Print to Kindle” option that will allow you to send pretty much anything and everything to your Kindle through the Windows print manager.  This latter feature will be genuinely useful for many people though, oddly, Amazon don’t make a fuss of either this or the wireless sync and you have do some digging on their website to find them out.

By default the Send to plug-in supports .DOC, .DOCX, .TXT, .RTF, .JPEG, .JPG, GIF, .PNG, .BMP and .PDF files though the printing option will extend this considerably.  Printed documents are sent as PDF files.

You can download the Send to Kindle software from the Amazon website for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 and the Kindle apps for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch are also supported.  Amazon say that support for other devices and for the Mac will be coming soon.

DragonDisk is a free Amazon S3 file management client for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The program can be used to backup, share and organize files in an interface that looks similar to that of many ftp clients.

The first thing that you need to do after installing the software is to add at least one S3 account to the account list. Click on File > Accounts to open the account management window. A click on New opens another window where you need to enter account related information. This includes the account name, access key, secret key, if SSL is enabled and several other options under the advanced tab.

Once you have configured the account you can log in using the Root pulldown menu on the left or right side of the software. The account name should be listed there along with all local storage devices.

You can load a second Amazon S3 account or display the contents of a local hard drive in the second part of the interface.

All files and folders are displayed by default. You can use filters to limit names or extensions in the file listing.

Once connected, you can copy files to or from the Amazon S3 storage, edit files, change permissions or metadata.

Another interesting option is the ability to create sync jobs that can be run regularly. You could use it to make a local backup copy of your Amazon storage or specific files stored there.

DragonDisk supports versioning, external buckets, reduced redundancy storage as well as various compression and encryption algorithms.

Interested users can download the free application from the official program website.

What other options do you have? You could try and get a virtual credit card, either from a bank that is offering those cards or an online service such as Entropay. The first may work fine and without lots of administration, the second can be quite the hassle to setup and maintain. Plus, it can happen that virtual credit cards won’t be accepted by the service or website, in which case you are still not able to complete the sign up process.

An alternative to this are test credit card account numbers. They are not linked to any accounts or names. PayPal has a public page with test credit card account numbers available where you find credit card numbers for major companies such as American Express, Mastercard, Visa or Discover.

The expiration date can be freely selected, the only requirement is that it needs to be a data in the future in mmyy format.

The credit cards cannot be used to make purchases. What they can be used for however are services that require you to enter a credit card either during signup or for specific services they offer. One example would be Amazon’s AppStore service which requires you to enter a valid credit card account number to download the free apps that it provides on a daily basis.

It is likely that at least some sites and companies have banned those credit card numbers from being used on their sites. You’ll probably be surprised that they will work on a lot of sites on the other hand.

Disclaimer: Please note that companies or organizations may see it as fraud if you are using credit card information that are not your own. Neither ghacks nor the author of this article are responsible if this happens.

A recent article in the New York Times suggests that Amazon is now moving straight towards an even bigger goal. The company announced that it will publish 122 books in the fall of 2011 in “both physical and e-book form”.

According to the article Amazon is currently wooing top authors to publish their books directly on the shopping site. This puts publishers in a miserable position. They have to work with Amazon to sell books online but at the same time have to find a way to compete with the company as a publisher.

The move effectively eliminates the middle-men, the publishers and agents, and makes Amazon the jack of all trades. Amazon will do the editing, promoting, printing and selling. Regular Amazon users should not confuse Amazon Publishing with Amazon’s self-publishing platform CreateSpace. The former is the new division of Amazon while the latter allows everyone to publish their books on Amazon.

Amazon as a company will obviously benefit from this model. But what about authors and people who buy books? It is difficulty to say when it comes to authors. Amazon has not published any information about the deals that it struck with authors. Will authors make more money? The ones that Amazon is wooing most certainly will. It is likely that authors will get a bigger part of the pie considering that Amazon has to convince them somehow that it is worth to self-publish books.

Consumers on the other hand will likely not see a big difference. Amazon on the other hand has more control and leeway in the pricing which could be beneficial to customers.

Considering that Amazon has not shops in all countries of the world, it is likely that the Internet giant may need to cooperate to bring books to countries they do not have a shop in.

What’s your take on this? I personally think that this could shake things up quite a bit. Authors certainly find the option beneficial as it gives them more choice. Consumers on the other hand will likely be on the receiving end. Before Amazon Publishing they had the option to buy local or online. With Amazon Publishing, they can only buy on Amazon.

So called filler items are small inexpensive items that move the purchase over that threshold so that Amazon sends the items for free to your location.

One example to make it clearer: Say you have decided to buy the latest Harry Potter Blu-Ray on Amazon. It currently retails for $24.99. If you would only buy that item you would have to pay shipping costs on top of that price which would add $2.98 to the overall price that you have to pay. Shipping costs are even higher in other categories.

If you could find an item on Amazon that is sold for $0.01 you would save $2.97. This may not look as much but if your orders often do not qualify for Super Saving Shipping but come close then you may save quite some money over time.

Amazon Prime

Before we look at websites that let you search for filler items on Amazon, we should take a look at Amazon Prime.

If you order many smaller items on Amazon you may want to consider becoming an Amazon Prime member. You basically pay a yearly membership fee and get free shipping for all items on Amazon for the year. You find more information about Amazon.com Prime on the official website. You can sign up for a trial to test Amazon Prime.

Amazon Filler Services

Filler Item Finder

A rather messy looking website that claims to be in association with Amazon.com. You can enter the amount that you need for free shipping and filter by categories if you get to many results.

The site managed to return a lot of cheap items on Amazon, but only one $0.01 item and that was for a HTC Droid Eris Android Phone with a Verizon Wireless subscription. The second item would set you back $0.12 at the time of writing.

Cheapest item in the database: $0.13

FillerSeek

You can enter the amount needed to be eligible for free shipping on the Fillerseek website. It is furthermore possible to select a specific category that the filler item should be in. A click on search crawls the Amazon product database for products that match the requirements.

The site then displays products on the search results page. I was disappointed by the results, considering that the site suggested four or more Dollar items when my search explicitly asked for a $0.01 filler item.

Cheapest item in the database: $1

Amazon Filler Item Finder

This one is as basic as it gets. Just enter the amount you need to qualify for free shipping and hit the search button afterwards. You get a large list of product suggestions.

Like the other services so far, this one did not manage to find a one cent item on Amazon. Popular and very popular items are highlighted in the results listing. There is no option to filter by product group.

The site has a separate search engine for Canada and the United Kingdom.

Cheapest item in the database: $0.37

Superfillers

This service supports not only Amazon but other popular shopping destiations such as The Home Depot, Target or Petco. Just select the shopping site that you need filler items for on the left sidebar of the page and enter the amount that you are looking for.

The service displays items coming closest to the selected price first and then below that sorted into categories. This is actually more comfortable and eye pleasing than what the other services offered so far.

Cheapest item in the database: $0.37

Click Filler

Clickfiller displays a list of inexpensive products on the company’s start page. You can use the form at the top to filter for a specific price range, product names or categories.

The service, just like Filler Seek, fails to list the cheapest items on Amazon.

Cheapest item in the database: $0.99

Slick Fillers

Maintained by Slick Deals. You can search for a specific price and filter results by keyword or category.

The service, like many others fails to find one or two cent items on Amazon.

Cheapest item in the database: $0.40

Browser Extensions

Instead of using a third party website you can also use browser extensions to find filler items. PriceTrace is a price comparison add-on for the Firefox web browser that can search for filler items.

Just click on the fillers button in the toolbar when you are on Amazon. This opens a page on the official Pricefiller website that lists the filler items in the service’s database. Users who do not want to install an add-on for that can visit the page manually in every browser to search for items manually.

It does not make a lot of sense to install the add-on just for the price filler functionality, considering that you can add the search page on the PriceTrace website to your browser’s bookmarks to open it manually. Firefox users who use other features of the add-on, like price tracking, may find it handy on the other hand.

Cheapest item in the database: $0.56

Manual hunting for filler items

You can also try to find cheap items directly on Amazon to qualify for free shipping. Use a search like this one filler items search to find cheap items in the Industrial and Scientific category. There is even one item in the listing that you can buy for $0.01.

Verdict

Who would have thought that the cheapest filler items are not in the databases of the filler item services. All services do a lot better when the price that is needed to be eligible for free shipping goes up. Most shine starting around the $1 mark.

Manual hunting for items gets my recommendation if you are looking for items below the $1 Dollar mark.

Have another service to share? Let me know about it in the comments.

Update: The Pricetrace website is no longer available. Links have been removed.

You can, of course, read your kindle e-books on other devices too, but until now you’ve had to download an app in order to read a book on your iPad, or on your computer screen. There have been apps available for PCs, Macs, and every other conceivable device, for you to read your books wherever you may be. You can even read them on your iPhone if your eyesight is good enough!

But what was really missing in the Kindle armory was a web-based reader that could be run on anything capable of supporting a browser. With so much going on in “the cloud” these days, it was bound to happen sooner or later, and now you can read books from the Kindle Store, on anything with a web-browser. What’s more your Amazon account will automatically track the books you are reading and keep you up to date with your last read page, no matter what device you swap to.

There is another reason why Amazon has gone down the cloud-computing path however, and it has nothing to do with app-friendliness. By using a web-based platform for it’s Kindle store, the application isn’t regarded as a native program. In other words, it’s not a specific iPad app, or an iPhone app. By doing this, Amazon have avoided having to pay the 30% levy that Apple charges for any content sold through it’s devices. Apple announced plans to restrict the purchasing of products from applications running on their smart phones and tablets, and have prohibited links that allowed anyone to sell goods outside the Apple sales system. So Amazon has responded by building it’s Kindle app into a web application that runs on HTML5, and therefore bypasses the restrictions. Clever!

With Apple planning further restrictions in the future, many people are speculating that other companies will follow suit, and soon we’ll see more HTML5 apps being produced than native iPhone apps. It’s suggested that most companies will not be willing to bow to Apple’s levies, and will seek to develop new web based technologies to compensate for the loss of native apps. In the case of Amazon, why should Apple stand to gain 30% on every book sold via an Apple device? Many people see this as unfair, and they may well be right.

You can access the Amazon Kindle Clouder Reader here. Interestingly enough it is currently only compatible with Google Chrome and Safari browsers.

There are some things to take into consideration. You cannot just upload any music and expect it to be there for free and forever. The formatting of the music, its size, and any changes to the files or the subscription will affect the space used by the music.

Formatting

The music file has to be a DRM-free MP3 or M4A file for it to be freely stored on paid accounts. (Note: not the lossless m4a type.) Anything else will count against your space, plus they will not work with the Cloud Player. Files with just the extension, but which are really another type of file, naturally will go against the space.

Alterations

For songs you previously purchased through Amazon, the file you upload has to be identical to the file on their servers. If you change the file, then it will take up space on free accounts (it is still free for a paid account). There likely are two reasons for this. One, there is no question that a file is the one purchased if it is exactly the same. Two, if the file is the same, it only needs to exist on Amazon’s server once. Access, from there, is really shared. That is why they can afford to give the space to the purchased music.

Downgrading

Once you downgrade, any music that was not purchased from Amazon counts against your space. That space is only at 5 GB now. The good news is that, while you cannot upload any more files at this point, your files are not automatically deleted. Amazon does not specify the length of time before they delete your files, but they do reserve the right to. In any case, you will have a little time to pick which files you want to eliminate.

Size

Files must be under 100 MB. For most songs, that is fine, even for a long, high-quality song. For podcasts, however, that could be a problem. While rare, it is something good to know. I am probably in the minority, but I do have MP3 files that will not fit. Does this mean you cannot load the file? No. It just means that it will affect your space used.

Reminder: The ToS

Amazon’s terms of service are of concern. (They are even worse than Dropbox’s ToS.) They reserve the right to look at your files without notification or reason. That does not make it useless, but it does restrict usefulness. Using the service as a backup for files they know you have does make perfect sense.

Recommendations

I would definitely upload music I purchased directly from Amazon. That will always be free to store. To not use it as a backup for such music makes little sense. What should an audiophile do with the extra 5 gigs? Fill it up with free music from established sites like OverClocked Remix. Anything else would make me uncomfortable (even if I owned the physical tape or CD).

On a side note, a thank you to Amazon’s tech support. The details on what happens if you downgrade your account, while obvious, where not in the product description or FAQ. I actually contacted their support to clarify what would happen.

But fear not, we take a look at all three services, highlight their advantages and disadvantages so that you can make an educated decision after reading the article. Before we start we should probably take a look at cloud storage and syncing in general. The first question that you need to ask yourself is whether you need such a service at all.

Do you need your music in the cloud? You may answer that question with yes if you work on multiple computer systems or use smartphones and other mobile devices. The main advantage of cloud based music services is that you get access to your music on all devices that you can connect to the service. No more copying of songs or playlists, all songs that you have stored online are available on all compatible devices at all time, provided that you have a net connection and a good mobile subscription with enough free bandwidth.

Lets take a look at the services and some of their features:

Apple iCloud

Apple’s new service is tied to its iTunes software as expected. Users can use it to store up to 25,000 songs they have not purchased on iTunes, an unlimited number of songs they purchased on iTunes and an additional 5 Gigabyte of other data.

Users can pay $24.99 annually for iTunes Match which matches any song on iTunes and makes it available in the cloud as well taken directly from the iTunes store.

It appears as if iTunes Match is required to store music not purchased on iTunes in the cloud.

Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.

Apple iCloud requires iTunes to be installed. It is compatible with Apple’s mobile device lineup and limits access to ten authorized devices.

The main downside of the service is that it does not support streaming, and that users need to subscribe to iTunes Match if they want to have access to their non-iTunes purchases, like CD rips, on iCloud.

Google Music

Google Music is in Beta currently. During beta, users can upload a maximum of 20,000 songs to the service. Google has not revealed anything yet about pricing. Music is uploaded with the help of the Music Manager software that is available for PC and Mac (appears to be running with the help of Wine under Linux as well).

The service is currently restricted to the United States. It is also the only service without online store integration. Users need to keep in mind that the service is labeled as beta at this point in time. While that is typical of Google, it means that it is possible that Google will make changes to the final product. The company has already announced that the service will only be free during beta. It is therefor likely that a pricing structure similar to that of Amazon’s Cloud Drive is introduced after the beta.

Amazon Cloud Drive

Amazon users get 5 Gigabytes of free space, and an unlimited amount of space for their Amazon mp3 purchases. It is the only service where users can purchase additional storage, at $1 per Gigabyte per year.

Like Google Music, Amazon supports web streaming of music. It is possible to store other media and documents on the cloud drive as well, which is similar to iCloud’s offering. Music is uploaded via Amazon’s Cloud Player or a compatible web browser.

Closing Words

Every service has its advantages and disadvantages. Apple’s iCloud is tied to iTunes, and you need to pay if you want all of your music to be available in the cloud and not only your music purchased on iTunes. Google Music is currently in beta and it is not clear how much it will cost when it comes out. Amazon’s Cloud Drive feels like a mix of the two other services. It can be used to store more than just music just like Apple’s iCloud offers and supports web streaming like Google Music.

What’s your take on the three services and music in the cloud in general?

One thing that has bugged me a little bit for some time now is the mediocre display of product shots. The preview shots are very small, and while it is possible to click on an image for a larger preview, it is placed over the actual page of the item that you are looking at. Plus, you do not get to see hd images in their native resolution on that page. All you can do is click the mouse to enable an unhandy zoom mode.

The Firefox add-on PictureFox improves the default behavior on all Amazon shopping sites. It does not change the way the default Amazon image viewer works, but adds a link to an alternative directly on the page.

Here is an example of how that works. My nephew loves Lego Ninjago and I occasionally check out Amazon to see if there are new sets available.

Here is how the Amazon page looks like after you have installed PictureFox in the browser.

You can move your mouse cursor over a mini image on that page to display a thumbnail of it directly on the page. That’s the default behavior. Notice the HD link on top of the thumbnail image? A click on that loads the image gallery powered by PictureFox.

You can flip through all images on the page with the mousewheel, the cursor keys or the slider at the bottom of the page. Unlike Amazon, it is showing all images on the page directly in the gallery, including customer photos, marketplace photos and products where different colors are available. That simplifies the viewing significantly.

A click on an image loads its HD version directly on the same page, with options to view the image in fullsize in the browser, and to go back to the gallery and to close it completely.

Another interesting feature of PictureFox is that it displays direct image previews on the same page whenever you hover your mouse over an image on one of Amazon’s shopping sites.

This is pretty handy to view a larger preview of an image directly on the Amazon product page without loading a gallery first.

Firefox users can install PictureFox directly from the Mozilla Add-On repository.

Set Up the Double Download

By default, it is an extra step to download files from your Cloud Drive. The settings are easy to find. Naturally, you have to be signed in to get to these settings. You will also need the Amazon MP3 Downloader. This is free software that you can configure to sync with iTunes, Windows Media Player, or to not sync at all.

Step 1: Click on “Your Digital Items” on the top right of Amazon’s home page above the cart and wish list buttons (it may appear on other pages too).

Step 2: Under “Amazon MP3 Store” click on “You Amazon MP3 Settings,” found towards the middle of the page.

Step 3: Finally, you will see two settings, each with two options. Feel free to read through it, but you just have to make sure the first option in each of the two settings is selected. See the screenshot for all the detail.

Now when you aquire a song it will be loaded to your Cloud Drive and the MP3 Downloader will put the files on your computer. A small file that ends in .amz may download to your computer at first. Open it to launch the MP3 Downloader. Please note there is no “Apply Settings” or “Save Settings” to click on the website. You just click the circles next to the options you want and you are done.

Mooch Off Amazon a Full Album at a Time

Grabbing a heap of music from Amazon for free is easy. Oddly enough, I do not know anyone who takes advantage of it (locally at least).

You do not have to follow the steps above to download free music, but I would advise it. It gives you a backup, and free songs are perfect to try-out “double downloading” with. Why backup free music in the first place? Because it will not always be free; these are often limited time offers. You may have to pay to download something again if you lose a song. In case of accidental deletion or a hard drive crash, everything would be saved in a completely separate location, in this case Amazon Cloud Drive. Amazon lets you to download songs from there, for free, as many times as you like.

That said, let’s get to the free music!

Step 1: To get the the general MP3 section start from the main page, hover your mouse over “MP3s & Cloud Player” and then click on “MP3 Music Store” to the right. (Note: “Hover” means to move your mouse to something, but do not click the mouse button yet.)

Step 2: Scroll way down to about halfway down the page. You will see a lot of stuff: albums, information, icons, etc. You are looking for the image below. Click on “Free MP3 Albums” when you find it. You can alternatively use this link to go directly to that page: Free Music

Step 3: While you land at a page with the most popular music, you should consider narrowing it down to a genre you prefer. I recommend the Classical section. I found a number of full albums I liked there.

Wrapping Things Up

Note that you will need the Amazon MP3 Downloader to download full albums. This is regardless of your settings. The downloader has the benefit of enabling you to download multiple songs from the Cloud Player too (but not the Cloud Drive, which can only download files one at a time). That means you can restore all your Amazon music fairly easily, provided a backup was in the Cloud Drive, in the event of a computer problem. That is a nice free feature.

You also need to know that you can only download music from an Amazon store if the shipping address of your account is in the same country as the store.

The Amazon US store is currently offering 197 mp3 albums for free download. The German Amazon store only six albums.

I hope these little tips will save you some time and expose you to some new music. Enjoy!

Then there is the issue of who you host your email and other services with such as online document editing. The argument here is exactly the same however this is less about clutter and more about interoperability. It’s great when things just work well together, and bringing all these things together with a single service provider can often achieve that.

So it might come as no surprise to hear that I also believe in sticking with a single cloud-services backup provider if at all possible. More so, I’d recommend that this cloud backup provider should be the very same company that you host your email, documents and everything else online with.

So why you might ask am I being so stupid? Only this week Amazon became the latest company to experience huge issues with its cloud services. Also if you wanted everything hosted with Google what about the privacy concerns over services such as Streetview and Buzz, and the repeated hacking of GMail by the Chinese government. After all, if the Chinese can hack Google’s email service, surely so can any other determined group.

It stands to reason, quite logically then, that if you store everything with a single provider that if something were to go wrong the potential impact could be astonomical, and I agree that under a worst case scenario (the worst case obviously being a very, very worst thing that could ever happen, ever) this would indeed be the case.

However… Online backups are supposed to be just that, backups. I am hearing from an increasing number of people who are looking for a good service online to store their digital photographs. Be this Flickr, Google, Facebook or another service this is a terrible approach. We should not be looking to move our lives wholesale into the cloud, rather we should just be looking at the cloud as a way to back it all up with the added convenience of then being able to access those files from anywhere we like.

This is where services such as Dropbox and Mozy win out. They’ll automatically and invisibly synchronise the files on your PC with those in the cloud. The only problem with these services, and others such as Amazon’s S3 cloud backup, is that the companies that offer these don’t also offer all the other cloud services that we need and use on a day to day basis.

In truth, nobody else does either with the possible exception of Microsoft, and even there it’s complete online storage solution of 25Gb is not yet available to Windows users due to the technical limitations of having to merge two different online storage solutions, Live Mesh and Live Sync, into a single entity. It’ll happen and will no doubt be in place by the time Windows 8 comes around, but it’s far from available yet.

Google is even worse, not offering any kind of online backup at all (unless you count the Picasa online photo albums) and neither does Yahoo! and yet here we’re talking about three of the world’s largest email, online document and life management cloud providers. These are the companies we need to be storing everything with, surely.

Okay, I talked a little while ago about how disastrous things could turn out if your put all your eggs in one basket, so by this point you should be heaving a huge sigh of relief that you can’t actually do this yet. I would argue the opposite. Let’s set aside for a moment that simple fact that it is much easier to be able to actually do things with your files and data in the cloud when its all stored in the same place, that’s obvious. There are also important security and privacy pros to consider.

This being that it is very unlikely that anything more complex than username and password stealing will ever happen. There might be the odd occasional piece of annoying data loss, I myself lost some emails when Hotmail crashed recently, but there’s none of the annoying interconnectedness that you get when you have multiple services.

The upshot of this is that should there be a security breach you only have to go into a single service and change a single password. But! I hear you cry, this is exactly what I’d do if one of my many services were compromised! I’d beg to differ, for the simple reason that the more services we use in our lives, the more likely it will be that we’ll use the same usernames and passwords across them.

If you find that one of the cloud service providers you use has been compromised then you could have to change your Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay and other password because they’re all the same.

If you have your main online life in a single place then this, arguably most important, part of your life can be kept separate because it would be much easier to remember a different username and password if you only have to remember one for this and another for everything else.

Let’s not forget that if eBay, PayPal, Amazon or the like are hacked, much in the way Ashampoo was only this week, you only have to worry about how long it will take your bank to refund any fraudulent payments that are made. If your life in the clouds is hacked things will get far messier.

But! And you’re starting to get angry now I can feel, “if my Amazon password is exposed I will also have to change the password on eBay, PayPal etc you doofus!” This is exactly the point I wanted to make. While you will most likely have to change your password for these sites, firstly the impact will almost immediately be greatly minimised as you’ll most likely be using only one or two bank cards across all of them, and secondly your personal files and email will still be secure.

In creating your life in the clouds by putting all of the important things in a single place you are effectively minimising the damage that can be done elsewhere because that single place can have a seperate, very secure password. There can be no sending of spam from your email address (we all get spoofed from time to time), there can be no searching your online documents for sensitive financial information and you can rest much more pleasantly at night.

I firmly believe therefore that there’s a very strong case to be made for Google, Microsoft, Apple and the like to pull their finger out and provide a holistic cloud-based service for us all. We can then rely on Facebook to get us logging into shopping websites (which again helps minimise any damage as there’s less surface area for a hacker to attack) and the ultimate upshot is that we’re not only happier and more secure, but we’ll suddenly find that we have a better online life with it too.

All of the headlines, features, and promises have caused the public to overlook a disturbing section of the fine print in the lengthy legal agreement. As a part of using the Cloud Drive, Amazon reserves the right to look at your files. They don’t have to ask or notify you. They can even keep files you delete. They can even share this information with others. This kind of clause usually mentions something about courts, subpoenas, or some other legal context. There are no such conditions here.

“5.2.Our Right to Access Your Files. You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files: to provide you with technical support and address technical issues; to investigate compliance with the terms of this Agreement, enforce the terms of this Agreement and protect the Service and its users from fraud or security threats; or as we determine is necessary to provide the Service or comply with applicable law.”

This is in striking contrast to Dropbox, a service similar to Amazon’s Cloud Drive in many ways. You can upload files to Dropbox for storage through a web interface, just like with the Cloud Drive. In the Cloud Drive, files are unencrypted, easy for the company to read. Dropbox encrypts both its connection and its files, leaving only the file names unencrypted. This is to protect your privacy, but it does come at a cost. If you have a problem with a file, and an old version is not sufficient or available, then there is not much that Dropbox’s tech support can do. An IT employee at Amazon would able to take a closer look to diagnose the problem. Security is often a trade off between convenience and privacy, so there is some validity in Amazon’s decision.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Amazon’s 1984 incident shocked the world, and it is in a position to take such controversy to the next level. Anyone could find files missing, information leaked, or embarrassments made public. Alternatively, they could simply delete music you own.

There are some other parts of the agreement that are note worthy, but less than alarming. You are not supposed to share access of your account with anyone else. An unsurprising, and arguably sensible, clause. With no feature to share files, as found in Dropbox, this can create problems. The only way to share a file would be with a joint account, which would not be permitted in the agreement. There also is no way to publicize a file, so you cannot use the service for any kind of web hosting. In contrast, not only can Dropbox do that, but it can generate photo albums that can be shared with just a link.

To use the Service, you must have an Amazon.com account. You may only use the Service in connection with one Amazon.com account, so if you have multiple Amazon.com accounts, you’ll need to choose the account you want to use for the Service. The email address and password for your Amazon.com account are all that is required for access to files you store on the Service. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account and password and preventing their misuse and you agree to accept responsibility for all activities that occur under your account. You may not use a name, username or email address that you are not authorized to use or share your Amazon.com username and password with others for purposes of allowing others to use the Service through your account. If we suspend or terminate your use of the Service or your Amazon.com account, you may not use the Service through another Amazon.com account.

There is one kind of file that makes sense to store in Amazon’s Cloud Drive: any kind you got from Amazon. They already know you have it, so there is nothing for them to discover. Music is a prime example, and they literally have thousand of free songs. Several gigs of files can be loaded into the cloud drive in a single sitting, and new music purchased from Amazon (even for $0.00) never counts against your quota. This solves a problem that exists in other services: re-downloads. There is never a fee to download a song from your cloud drive. It effectively can be seen as an instant off-site backup. Hopefully Amazon will expand this service to other products such as games and movies.

While the privacy concerns limit the usefulness of Amazon’s Cloud Drive, it does not make it useless. It would be inadvisable to store sensitive information on it, but it provides a perfect backup for files you purchased from Amazon.

One of the latest addition to the list of support cloud based storage providers is Amazon Cloud Drive which was introduced by Amazon a few days ago. You can check out our initial coverage at Amazon Cloud Drive, Free Online Storage for an overview of the service.

To sum it up: Users get 5 Gigabytes of free online storage space for files, that they can increase by paying $1 per Gigabyte per year for up to a maximum of 1000 Gigabytes.

It was until now not possible to map the Amazon Cloud Drive storage to the local system. This has changed with the latest update of Gladinet Cloud Desktop. Amazon customers who have signed up for Cloud Drive can now integrate the storage as a virtual drive and directory on the local computer system.

Here is how it works. You select Amazon Cloud Drive from the list of available storage providers and assign a virtual directory name to that storage provider (which is then displayed in the root of the Gladinet drive).

You then fill in your Amazon username and password which are needed to establish the connection to Amazon’s service.

The third and final configuration screen is only relevant for users of the professional version of the software. Free users click on finish to complete the setup.

Gladinet Cloud Desktop adds a My Gladinet Drive with the drive letter z: to the system. This drive lists all mapped cloud storage spaces as directories in its root.

You can from that moment on work with the mapped cloud storage folder as if it would be a local folder.You can copy or move files into or out of the folder, create directories or delete data.

The video below demonstrates the setup of Gladinet Cloud Desktop and the integration of Amazon Cloud Drive into Windows Explorer and the Windows operating system.

Interested users can download Gladinet Cloud Desktop from the developer website. The free version has several limitations which are outlined at the product comparison page. The most limiting feature in terms of mapping and file operations is the 1000 file limit per task. This basically means that you can only copy or move a total of 1000 files per task. You are however not limited in the number of tasks.

Most users should never hit that limit anyway, and those who do need to divide the file operations into multiple tasks to transfer all the files.

Every Amazon customer, even new customers without purchases, gets 5 Gigabytes of online storage. US customers who have purchased at least one digital music album on Amazon get 20 Gigabytes of extra space for the first year.

Mp3 files that are purchased on Amazon can be transferred to the cloud drive where they do not count against the storage limitations.

Paid plans are available starting at 20 Gigabytes and up to 1000 Gigabytes. Each Gigabyte sets you back $1 per year with no additional costs (which means no data transfer rates).

Amazon Cloud Drive appears to be browser based at this point in time, with no option to map the storage or access it via third party tools. Upload and download of data is handled via the browser interface. All data transfers make use of HTTPS and authentication.

The cloud storage is folder based with folders for documents, music, pictures and videos available by default. Users can create folders or subfolders to sort and organize files. I was not able to upload using Firefox, switched to Google Chrome and it worked without problems in the browser.

The uploads are handled in the background, it is possible to switch pages on Amazon Cloud Drive without interrupting the uploading or downloading of files.

Files can be moved, copied, renamed, downloaded or deleted once they have been uploaded to Amazon’s online storage.

US users can install Amazon’s Cloud Player for Web or Cloud Player for Android to play the music they have uploaded to the cloud. The web player supports all popular web browsers with the exception of Opera (officially). Both players can play mp3 and aac music files as long as they have no drm. Basic controls are available to select songs based on artist, title or album. It is furthermore possible to create playlists.

5 Gigabytes seems to be the standard free storage size that most cloud based storage services offer. Amazon Cloud Drive looks solid on paper, especially the pricing is attractive when compared to solutions such as Dropbox. Dropbox on the other hand is more flexible when it comes to accessing the storage space and transferring data. It is just not practicable to upload thousands of files, stored in multiple folders to Amazon Cloud Drive. Another missing feature is a file sharing option.

Amazon customers from the US, who purchase mp3 albums regularly are most likely to use Cloud Drive extensively, especially if they own an Android smartphone as they are then able to use the player on the Android phone to listen to music stored online. Plus they can use the Amazon Cloud Player to upload music from their computer more comfortably.

Everyone else is severely limited by the web-only interface. The Terms of Service contain several passages that could convince users not to upload files to the Amazon Cloud Drive.

You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files

We may also restrict your access to the Service if we determine that your use of the Service violates this Agreement or substantially exceeds normal use by other users

While those appear to be common phrases in Terms of Services it is still scary to know that Amazon may access and use the files that you upload.

Here is the link if you want to try out Amazon Cloud Drive.

Amazon’s recently introduced Appstore changes that, at least for Amazon customers in the US. It is likely that the feature will be introduced in other Amazon stores at a later time. For now, US customers of Amazon can test drive a selection of Appstore apps directly on site.

How does the Test Drive Now feature work in detail? Well you visit the Amazon.com AppStore and locate the Test Drive Before You Buy section located on the right sidebar.

Please note that this module is only visible if you are logged into an Amazon account. You do not need to be connected with an IP address from the United States.

A click on Test Drive other apps opens a listing of all Android applications that are available for testing. You can now click on any application listed to be taken to the individual product page. Your IP address will be checked on page load, and only users from the US will see the Test Drive Now button on the page.

Users from other countries will see the same product page sans the Test Drive now button. Test Drive makes use of an Android emulator to give Amazon customers the option to try out the app before they make the decision whether to buy it.

Clicking the “Test drive now” button launches a copy of this app on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a web service that provides on-demand compute capacity in the cloud for developers. When you click on the simulated phone using your mouse, we send those inputs over the Internet to the app running on Amazon EC2 — just like your mobile device would send a finger tap to the app. Our servers then send the video and audio output from the app back to your computer. All this happens in real time, allowing you to explore the features of the app as if it were running on your mobile device.

The Android emulator opens in an overlay once the Test Drive Now button is clicked on. I was not able to test an app though, even while connected to an US virtual private nework. The message “Please check your connection and try again” appeared every time I tried to launch an app.

How to Test Drive

This trial allows you to interact with the app to get a sense of how it would function on your mobile device.

• Control the app by clicking and dragging your mouse on the device display to the left.
• Features that access device features or hardware (camera, GPS, etc.) may not function as they will on your mobile device.
• Keyboard input is currently not supported at this time.

Making use of an Android emulator to offer customers the chance to test drive an app before they purchase is improves the quality of the appstore tremendously. Not all apps can be tested this way though, but it is interesting that Amazon offers testing for free and commercial apps.

Not all Amazon accounts are affected by the security issue. According to Heise, only passwords that have not been changed for a long time are affected.

The only information available at this point in time is a test that Heise Online conducted. It revealed that a password that was changed last year was immune while older passwords were not. Some commenters in the forum were able to use password variants on accounts were passwords had not been changed since 2007.

Amazon users can test the vulnerability of their account by logging into Amazon. They could for instance change a lower case character to upper case, or append characters at the end of the password if it exceeds eight characters.

Affected accounts can be protected by changing the account password. Passwords are changed in the Change Name, E-mail Address, or Password setting under Your Account.

Update: It needs to be noted that the flaw still exists on all Amazon properties. Amazon customers who have been with the popular shopping portal for years need to change their passwords at the Amazon website to protect their account from the flaw in design.

It appears as if Amazon has changed the password functions on their sites in past years to protect new customers and those who change their passwords from the issue.

The books can only be loaned once however and for a maximum period of 14 days.  You can read loaned books on a Kindle or in any Kindle App.  These are available for a variety of devices including Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone.

Not all books will be available for lending, this will depend on the publishers providing permission for Amazon to do so.  There’s also precious little information on whether this will be a free service or what charges may be payable, again we can probably assume this will vary depending on the book and publisher.

This is an interesting move from Amazon and, while it was broadly expected at some point, it will be an interesting move to watch to see how it affects eBook sales.  It is widely considered that Libraries have been good for overall book sales in recent years, so will this move do the same for eBook sales?

You can read more at the Amazon website.

Some Amazon users might prefer that Amazon is not keeping a record of visits to third party sites while some might not want to see personalized ads on Amazon sites and third party sites.

Personalized ads can be problematic when multiple users use a single computer system as the recommendations are then all mixed together (unless each customer has an individual account that is used whenever Amazon is opened).

Amazon offers an opt-out procedure. This opt-out has the following two effects:

• No personalized ads are displayed to the Amazon customer on Amazon first party sites and third party sites that display Amazon ads.
• Amazon will not record the user’s visits to third party sites that display Amazon advertisements.

It is fairly easy to opt-out of Amazon personalized ads and third party information collection.

Open the Amazon website and locate the Your Account link in the top right corner of the screen.

Scroll down on the next page until you see the link “Your Advertising Preferences” in the Personalization section. Clicking that link opens the following screen.

The opt out button on the left can be used to disable personalized ads and information collection on third party websites.

Personalized Ads. We want the ads you see on Amazon.com and its affiliated sites, as well as the ads you see from Amazon or its affiliates on other third-party websites, to be as relevant to you as possible. Often, our advertising is based on personal information about you, such as your purchases on Amazon.com, visits to Amazon Associate web sites, or use of payment services like Checkout by Amazon on other web sites.

If you do not want us to use this information to allow third parties to personalize ads we display to you on Amazon.com and its affiliated sites, or to allow us to personalize Amazon or its affiliates’ ads displayed to you on third-party sites, click the button on the left of this page to turn off this feature.

Please keep in mind that you will still see ads on Amazon.com and its affiliated sites, they just won’t be personalized by third parties. Similarly, you may still see Amazon and its affiliates’ ads on third-party sites; they just won’t be personalized by us.

Information Collection. Like other internet advertisers, Amazon and its affiliates are able to keep a record of third-party web sites you visit that display our advertisements and content links.

If you do not want us to keep a record of your visits to third-party web sites, click the button on the left of the page to turn off this feature, and we will no longer record, store or use this information. However, all previously collected information will be retained by our systems to better personalize your web experience and improve our services.

The opt out button will turn into an opt in button if it is pressed to give the customer an option to activate the feature again.

In this article I will show you how to install and use Calibre to manage your Kindle book reader. NOTE: I have written about Calibre before (but only covered managing books in the Sony ebook reader). See my article “Manage Sony Reader in Linux”  for more details.

Installation

Installation is simple as you will find Calibre in the standard repositories. So you will only need to issue a command like sudo apt-get install calibre. Or you can do the usual:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software application.
2. Search for “calibre” (no quotes).
3. Mark Calibre for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

You can fire up Calibre either from the command line (enter calibre) or from the Applications > Office menu. As you will know (from previous Ghacks Calibre articles), the interface is simple. I won’t go over that. But I will walk you through the new first run wizard for setting up Calibre to be used with a Kindle.

Figure 1

When you first fire up Calibre you will be asked to set up the application for your eReader. The first step you will see this in is shown in Figure 1. Make sure you select the correct version of the Kindle you own.

Figure 2

In the next step you will set up how Calibre can send books to your Kindle without the device having to be plugged in. You will need to know your Kindle email address in order to set this up. Figure 2 shows the information you will need in order to get this working. You can use Gmail mail servers if you do not have access to an smtp server. I highly recommend you test the email settings before you move on. Upon a successful email test, you can then click the Next button to complete the setup.

Sending books to your Kindle

Figure 3

Let’s say you have already added a bunch of books to your Kindle. You don’t have your Kindle attached to your computer but you want to send a few books anyway. If you open up your library and right click a book you want to send you can select the book to be sent to your Kindle email address (see Figure 3).

Yes, there are books on my Kindle written by me ;-).  As usual, the emailed book will only arrive to your Kindle if you have the Whispernet turned on.

Final thoughts

Managing your Kindle books is getting easier and easier. And thanks to applications like Calibre, the task only gets more seamless.

Wootch, a free software program for the Windows operating system, is one of those applications that adds a feature that many Amazon customers can benefit from. The program can be used to monitor Amazon price changes. Monitoring prices can be helpful to buy specific items once they have dropped below a price limit that has been set by the user.

Wootch comes as an add-on for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and as a standalone software for the Windows operating system. It supports the five Amazon stores in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and France.

Items can be monitored by selecting one of the supported Amazon marketplaces, typing in an item that should be monitored, selecting a category (optional) and pressing the enter key. Wootch will search the Amazon store for items that match the product name and display them in the list.

Each item comes with basic descriptions, a link to the Amazon store page and the option to add it to the monitored items in Wootch.

The application displays the current price of the item and a second price form that the user can use to enter the desired price of the item. It is possible to monitor the Amazon marketplace and the used item market at Amazon. It us furthermore possible to activate notifications for every price change even if the price is above the user’s price limit and availability changes.

Items can be grouped which can be helpful for users who monitor many Amazon items. The program can notify the user by email or popup which should be both self-explanatory.

Wootch will automatically record every price change of monitored items which become available in the Price History graph which can be helpful to identify pricing trends.

Users who shop Amazon for mp3 can use a preview feature to listen to mp3 previews of the songs offered if available.

Wootch is an interesting program for Amazon users who want to monitor items that they want to purchase if the price drops below a set limit. The program can be downloaded from the developer’s website.