Should we be able to print books from the Kindle for our personal use?
Can you print an e-book from Kindle when it’s connected to your desktop machine with USB? In general, no, you can’t—but you can do so by copying text in “My Clippings.” Here’s how:
- First, you need to highlight the text you want to copy while reading a book on the Kindle. You’ll see a box around the highlighted text. This will copy the text to a file on the Kindle in My Clippings.
- Now connect your Kindle to your computer through the USB, and copy the My Clippings file to your computer.
- Open the file and print it.
Of course, this way you can’t print the whole book. You have to do it page by page. And for sure, this isn’t convenient. So what can you do? You can’t do anything unless there is some hack by someone. Now the question is, Do you really want to print an e-book that you read on Kindle? Should we have the privilege to do so?
When we didn’t have any dedicated e-book devices, we could print an e-book in PDF or in other formats, if not the whole book. Now, with dedicated devices, we have been restricted to do a lot of things. With Sony reader, you can, at least, read your purchased e-book on desktop; and with Kindle you lose that. Why should we give up so much freedom? Shouldn’t we raise our voice?
February 3rd, 2008 at 9:44 am
I don’t think I’d ever print a whole book, but what I would really like is to be able to ‘lend’ the book by giving up the license to someone. With print books, I lend them all the time. (Right now, if there’s a book I think I’ll want to lend someone, I buy it in hard copy.)
February 3rd, 2008 at 6:50 pm
What if you’re camping and you fear running out of, or losing, batteries and you know you wont be near electricity? What if the book is essential for research, and you need to be sure you have a hard copy? What if you’re a writer and you want to do some serious annotation in the margins? What if the e-book is a textbook and as crunch time comes, you know you want to yellow-highlight? What do you do if you go up to your lake cottage and like to read on the dock under the full sun, and don’t want to risk dropping it in the drink? What if you’re the type that falls asleep reading in the tub?
Anyone heard anything about the iRiver e-reader?
March 16th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
I am an author and researcher with the opinion that the Kindle is a wonderful device technologically, but severely compromised by the policies surrounding it. The print limitation is a serious setback which limits the Kindle’s usefulness and appeal.
In the past, I have stripped the spines of books I own and run them through an OCR setup, giving me a searchable file, printable as I see fit. There is no copyright infringement in this at all. However, it appears that amazon has a dim opinion of its customers, believing they cannot be trusted to voluntarily obey the laws pertaining to copyright. While this is fine in New America, home of the lame, it is insulting to those who made America great through industrious activities and literary endeavors.
So, there.
Jack Trimpey
September 14th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
I recently purchased a book for my Kindle that contains short (one or two-page) templates for personal legal documents such as living wills and health care proxies. The author of the book fully intends readers to copy and use the templates as they see fit. This is a great illustration of why being able to copy and print from Kindle (or other e-readers) with relative ease is important and worthwhile. I am a big fan of not killing trees, but sometimes our society requires things like legal documents to be in a fixed, physical format.
September 15th, 2009 at 11:46 am
Many of the reasons given above for needing a paper backup of an electronic file just sound like excuses to me, most of them ably solved by a spare set of batteries or a waterproof case.
Nevertheless, if you legitimately need printed copies of a book or document, you should take that into account when purchasing the document. Lamenting that you can’t print a Kindle page is like buying a plane and lamenting that you can’t drive it down the highway… or paying for cable and complaining because you can’t run a line from your house to your buddy’s house. That’s simply not the way the system is designed, and if the system doesn’t work for you, you shouldn’t buy into it.
There are e-book formats and systems (like PDF) that make printing a bit easier than the Kindle system… you should use those exclusively, and stop trying to fit square Kindles into round printing holes.
October 23rd, 2009 at 12:36 pm
I would love it if the Kindle could print. I’m a Realtor and all my documents are in PDF. I would love to use the Kindle DX as a document management system and have all my files with me at the same time (backed up elsewhere of course). When I need to print a contract, it would be great if I could just connect the Kindle to a USB printer. I would even by a portable printer.
I’m sure Amazon can restrict the printing of copyrighted material and let us print our own PDFs.