Boost your productivity with Kindle Paperwhite

• Send PDFs to Kindle for reading
• Read and highlight business books
• Export single notes
• Export all notes from a book using Clippings.io

I’ve been going wild on finding productivity shortcuts lately and part of this was buying the new Kindle Paperwhite.

See how cute and little it is next to the old Kindle DX? I loved my old one and bought the big screen because I read fast. But I am going a-travelling a lot more these days and small has become more beautiful.

Before now, I’ve always kept my old Kindle DX for personal novel reading. I would buy the paper copies of business books because it was easier to flick through them and just type stuff I wanted directly into a file. In theory, I could highlight text on the old Kindle and even put in notes. But the keyboard was truly awful and I could never get the notes off the Kindle (apparently it could do this but I could never get it to work). My old Kindle is littered with highlighted passages I intended to copy over to my laptop for witty posts and Quotes of the Week… and alas, they remain there untouched.

The new Kindle Paperwhite is a vast improvement. The onscreen keyboard is still slow but okay. I’ll live with it because now I can share notes directly to Evernote. I can also highlight passages and share them directly to Twitter… on the fly.

Now I can also export all the notes in a file using the Export Notes button in the Kindle. That’s not available in every book or document though so I discovered Clippings.io. You can import all your notes and highlights and Clippings.io magically organises them all for you. Then you can export to PDF, Word, Excel or Evernote.

This now means I would seriously consider buying Kindle versions of business-related books.

The other truly awesome thing is that now I can send PDF files to the Kindle to read. I read and marked up a good friend’s manuscript on the Kindle, which saved my eyes 5 hours of backlit screen on an iPad. For me, that’s well worth having an extra device to manage.

In terms of protecting the new Kindle, I said no to the $59 cover at JB Hifi and instead bought this lightweight cover from eBay for $12. When I open the cover, it automatically wakes up the Kindle. It’s rather cliched, I know, but it feels cosy and the cover has a kind of hardback feel to it.