AO/HEO Kindle Ready Books

Ambleside Online and House of Education Online…two of my favorite curriculums.

Kindle- my absolute favorite ereader.

Put them together and you get Extraordinarily Awesome I put together a site that has AO/HEO Kindle ready books. It is called NLHome’s Compiling Spot (simply because at first it was for my own use and I didn’t intend on sharing! haha).

When I started with AO Yrs 5 and 7 (Lite), I went about searching for the books as cheap as I could possibly find them –at used book stores, on Amazon, alibris, paperbackswap, used curriculum groups. I did find a lot of good deals and now I have quite a few bookshelves with a good many of the books (some of which I will not part with ). I read on the computer a lot but don’t particularly care for how it fatigues my eyes. I got to the point of printing out a lot of the books we would be using. That got costly real quick. Our printer is a good one but a little on the older side and the cartridges are some of the most expensive.

But when I got a Kindle for my birthday last year….oh! what a treat!

Talk about savings! I have over 700 books on it right now (uh, no, not all of those are for school!). A good number are for school, however. A good portion of them were free or very inexpensive. I originally went looking on Amazon for the books…but I think that people are catching on that they can make a few pennies by republishing public domain books which caused some free books to be much more than free! I started a website that I originally intended to have for just the free books that are recommended for AO/HEO. You can find a lot of them on Project Gutenberg or Manybooks.net (which is a subsidiary of PG) but there are a few other places as well. Google Books used to be a great resource for PDF files (I am finding it difficult to navigate through the site now).

I’m working on updating it (uh, really I am) but right now it is good up until Yr 9.

Kindle Collections Manager

Do you have a Kindle? Do you love your Kindle? Do you have a lot of books on your Kindle? Do you find it somewhat difficult to manage your books/collections? Well, then there is a possible solution: Give your Kindle to someone that does not get annoyed at anything -ever. Problem solved! 

Of course, just kidding. Buy that person their own Kindle! and then download the Kindle Collection Manager. It is in beta at the moment and is only for Windows but it makes it somewhat easier to manage your books/collections on Kindle. Here's how it works, somewhat ;)

You go to Kindle Collections Manager website and register. You will receive an email with the download link. From there you will download the zip file that has the installation software. You will have this application on your computer in whatever location you put it (mine automatically goes to Program Files).

When you want to manage your books, plug in your Kindle to the computer and open the Kindle Collections Manager program. It will come up with a window like this (give or take a few books and most likely the collection titles will be somewhat different ) To get a better look at it, click on image (use back button to come back to this post)

When it comes up, it has every book on your computer that is compatible with Kindle (on the left) and it also shows all the books on your Kindle (on the right). It also shows duplicates –even when you don’t know you have any and even if you think that you don’t have any and it shouldn’t be showing that you do, such as the little snippet below. There are a lot of duplicates on my Kindle according to this.

You can rename your books, delete them (gasp!) and/or move them into collections or start new collections. When you download the software it comes with a “Brief instructions” notepad document. It’d be good to read that over before going to far but as far as I can see, this program is fairly easy to use

Well, another software/application to add to my growing number of technology gadgets

Kindle Lending Club

Well, it's amazing where the internet will take you! I'm doing my paper on what forces/experiences were the greatest that shaped the US Constitution and some how (okay I know how I got there!) I end up at Kindle Lending Club! It's still in the beta phase and I hope that it will soon allow for more than one lend/borrow but for right now I am so excited about this! 

You'd have to read all the FAQ's to get all the nitty gritty details (which I will do another time). But thought it was a great find :)

And in case you are interested in my bunny trail, here it is (all of which has nothing to do with the paper I am working on in the background lol):

searched: how to go plasticless

clicked: How to Reduce Plastic Usage- My Top 10. Ok, 15.

clicked: here (talking about produce bags in #4)

went back to search page and clicked: Martin Higgins (PlasticLess) on Twitter

clicked: KindleLending tweet (Will you purchase more than 40 books over the life of your Kindle? It may be the greenest option: http://t.co/gdkR4kH)

clicked: @KindleLending view full profile

followed KindleLending on twitter

clicked: http://www.KindleLendingClub.com

Downloading Books onto the Kindle for PC...From Places Other than Amazon...Using Mozilla Firefox

If you are looking for how to download with Internet Explorer, look here. For Google Chrome downloads, look here. If you need to find the original post about downloading from somewhere other than Amazon, look here. Still not the right one? Try the search on the left sidebar.

On this post, I will be working with Mozilla Firefox downloading a book from Manybooks to the Kindle for PC.

This is assuming you have chosen your book from Manybooks and are choosing the format for download. Choose .azw or .mobi for use with Kindle for PC. Click download. A dialogue box will pop up asking if you would like to Open or Save the file.


You can either have it open directly with Kindle for PC, which might be the easiest way, or Save the file manually. For the purposes of downloading the book to Kindle for PC I will choose to have it directly opened/downloaded right now.

This next screenshot is of Google Chrome opening Kindle for PC but it will look the same with Mozilla Firefox, mine was just too fast for me to capture a screenshot.


Kindle for PC opens and begins the book. Check here for an how-to on using the Kindle for PC.

Downloading Books onto the Kindle for PC...From Places Other than Amazon...Using Google Chrome

If you are looking for how to download with Internet Explorer, look here. If you need to find the original post about downloading from somewhere other than Amazon, look here. Still not the right one? Try the search on the left sidebar.

On this post, I will be working with Google Chrome downloading a book from Manybooks to the Kindle for PC.

This is assuming that you have chosen your book from Manybooks and are choosing the format for download. Choose .azw or .mobi for use with Kindle. Click download.

After it downloads completely, click on the file downloaded. Kindle for PC will automatically start to open.


From here you can enjoy your book!
Check out my posts on how to use the Kindle for PC here, but you probably already know :)

Downloading Books onto the Kindle for PC...From Places Other than Amazon...Using Internet Explorer

My last post on downloading books to Kindle for PC..from places other than Amazon...showed how to search for a book on Manybooks.net and which format to choose for Kindle. This time I will go through the steps of actually downloading and putting it onto the Kindle for PC from Internet Explorer. I intend to go through these steps with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox as well.

This is assuming that you have chosen your book from Manybooks and are choosing the format for download.

After choosing to download (I chose .azw format), a dialogue box will pop up asking if you would like to Open, Save or Cancel. Click Save.



Make sure of where the file is going to be saved to. In order to easily find it later, put it in My Kindle Content (located in Documents unless you put it somewhere else...).


And now would be the best time to rename the file if you would like to something easier to remember.


Now to make sure the book downloaded correctly. Do this by either finding the file "An Island Story" in My Kindle Content and double-clicking or by opening the Kindle for PC and then browsing by author or title for the book on the Kindle. It doesn't always alphabetize the books like it's supposed to.


I think that is it, don't think I have forgotten anything... If I have, let me know :)

Downloading Books onto the Kindle for PC...From Places Other than Amazon

In another post I made a somewhat useful tutorial on how to use the Kindle for PC but it was for books coming directly from Amazon.com, where the Kindle for PC is downloaded from. What about using Project Gutenberg, or Manybooks.net?? How do we get them on the Kindle for PC?

It's much the same process but without the 'buying' from amazon. I say it that way because, well, you don't buy the books because they are free.

Anyway, shall we get started? First go to the site you wish to download books from. In this case I will use Manybooks.net

Enter the author, title, subject or genre you are looking for in the search box.



At first I tried Our Island Story but with no results so instead I chose An Island Story by H. E. Marshall. Press enter (or if you would like to try the Advanced Search click that).



Click the title listed if it is correct. If it isn't, try another search or the Google search. When you find the book you want, you see an excerpt, which is nice. On the right you see the download pull-down box.





From here the process of opening and reading the book is the same as if it were downloaded from Amazon.com

Depending on your browser, you may need to choose the file to put the book in. Usually I use Google Chrome and it downloads it automatically. I will post a tutorial on that another time.

I hope it has been somewhat helpful. Leave some feedback if you were helped...or if you weren't help me figure out where I went wrong ;)

eReaders for the PC (and MAC)...Part 1, continued

Disclaimer: I am not paid or reimbursed for these 'reviews' and how-to's. I do them because I think they may be useful. I do not have a MAC computer, therefore I cannot vouch for the compatibility of these eReaders on MAC. The statement that they are compatible is based on the software claims. Enjoy!


So last post my Kindle for PC was downloading the book that I had just ordered (for free!) from amazon.com

I left it for a bit and did some other things. When I came back, here is what my Kindle looked like:



It automatically opens at the 'beginning' of the book, not necessarily where you want it to. You can find a different location of the book by clicking on Go To. A drop down menu will appear with your options. Some books will allow you to go to the Table of Contents, but this one unfortunately does not have that feature. If you click on Cover, that is exactly where it takes you.





You can turn the pages using your arrow keys, or placing the mouse cursor on the right or left of the page and clicking. For this book, a few 'pages' into it, there is a Table of Contents which are linked to the particular chapter in the book. Click on a chapter, and you're taken to the beginning of that chapter.





You probably can see that I have a larger screen on my computer and it spreads out the eReader quite a bit. I personally like to have the books I'm reading look more like, well, books. To do that, click on the Aa icon at the top of the eReader. From here you have the option of changing the size of font, the number of words per page, the color of the background (and if you choose black, then the font turns white), and the brightness of the page.





If you are not happy with your settings you can choose to reset it to the default setting. Also if you accidentally go to the wrong place in the book, click Back and it takes you to your last viewed page. One of the good things about the Back feature is that even if you scroll over a page or a few and then realize you are in the wrong spot, clicking Back takes you to the place you were before you turned any pages.

The Kindle for PC is a great eReader, in my opinion. It has some 'faults', such as the format the books are in to download them needs to be in one that it reads. If you go to Project Gutenberg and want to download an etext book to read on your Kindle for PC, as far as I know and have tried, you cannot read it on your Kindle for PC. In this case, you need to download it as a Mobi or MobiPocket format. The Kindle for PC will not read EPUB format.