This article is more than 1 year old

Amazon wires up email-to-Kindle to its gigantic online hard drive

Send attachments to your e-book reader, watch Bezos' cloud drive slurp it up

Amazon.com has just switched on an email-to-the-cloud service for owners of its Kindle gadgets.

The cloud giant gives each Kindle an @kindle.com email address and firing files at one of those inboxes uploads the documents to the corresponding device: after a brief registration process to ensure a Kindle only accepts incoming "personal documents" from trusted sources, the device will gobble emailed .DOC, .PDF and .HTML attachments, plus images in several supported formats.

Amazon also operates a sync 'n' share service called Amazon Cloud Drive. Until today there was nothing startling about this service: it's a vanilla Dropbox clone that offers 5GB of space for free, and can be accessed using iOS, Android, Windows and Mac software.

But the House of Bezos just did something rather interesting to the service, because now when you email a document to your Kindle, it will automatically appear in your online Amazon Cloud Drive.

That trick is possible in Dropbox, but only thanks to third-party outfit sendtodropbox.com.

Perhaps Amazon is rattled by Dropbox's looming and likely colossal IPO, and reacted accordingly, or perhaps not: Amazon has form for doing things just because it can. It's too early to tell, but we're intrigued to see where this email-to-cloud move leads to. ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like