Leslie H. Nicoll

You can have multiple Kindles, like the Kindle Paperwhite, as well as other devices running the Kindle application (PCs, smartphones, and so on) registered to your Kindle account. You can register a new Kindle Paperwhite either from the device or from your computer via your Amazon account. For other devices, download the Kindle app and register using the device.

Do you enjoy graphic novels, comics, and manga? You can read all these on your Kindle Paperwhite. A few special features improve the reading experience for these kinds of visual documents. Panel view: In a book with multiple panels on a page, you can double-tap the screen to enlarge each panel to full-screen for an optimized reading experience.

You can find many sources of free content for your Kindle Paperwhite. The quickest and easiest way to find free e-books, games, and other offers that are available at Amazon is to search the Top 100 Free category. Not all the free e-books are restricted to classics; various publishers run special promotions to entice readers to try new authors — often on the eve of a new e-book release.

You can loan an e-book to anyone — even if the person doesn’t have a Kindle Paperwhite! All you need is the person’s e-mail address and a book that has loaning enabled. You can loan e-books from your computer. Follow these steps to lend an e-book to a friend: Open a web browser on your personal computer and go to the Manage Your Kindle page.

Many Kindle Paperwhite owners join user forums, where a wide variety of problems can be addressed by helpful forum members. Amazon has a Kindle product forum that covers Kindle Paperwhite and all its e-reader devices. You can access the forum in several ways. The easiest is to go to the main Kindle Store on Amazon and choose Discussions, at the top of the page.

If you want to read a file on your Kindle Paperwhite that’s in an unsupported file type, you can install software on your computer that can read different file types and then convert those files to Kindle-compatible formats. A few such options are calibre: Available for PC or Mac, calibre can convert e-books in a host of formats, including CBZ, CBR, CBC, CHM, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, SNB, TCR, and TXT.

Some of your personal documents that you load on your Kindle Paperwhite may be PDF documents. The Kindle Paperwhite can read PDF documents natively — in other words, without converting them. The Kindle Paperwhite handles PDF documents differently from how it handles text in the usual Kindle format: PDF documents are displayed with the text and graphics laid out exactly as in the original PDF document.

As you’re reading on your Kindle Paperwhite, you may want to highlight text to refer to later or add your own notes to a particular passage. You may even want to make a Facebook post or Twitter Tweet that includes an excerpt from the e-book. The touchscreen makes it particularly convenient for you to make these marks, or annotations: Highlights shade a section of text to draw attention to it.

Learning how to navigate your Kindle Paperwhite like a pro cuts down on precious time you'd really like to use reading. If you’re a seasoned Kindle Touch owner, the following information should be familiar. However, if you're upgrading from a Kindle with buttons or are new to Kindle overall, the following primer will get you started.