What Else Can I Do with My New Ereader?

Dear Lifehacker,
I just got this new ereader for the holidays, and I'm wondering what fun stuff I can do with it besides buy and read books from the official store. Any suggestions on how I can get a little more out of it?

Sincerely,
Newly Nooked

Dear NN,
While most ereaders are billed as simple devices that you can purchases books on and read, they actually have a few hidden talents, and a number of these tricks work on the tablet apps as well. Whether you want to push the device to new extremes by jailbreaking it, or you simply want to collect more reading materials (for free) in one place, here are a few clever uses for your new ereader.

Load Up Your Ereader with Free or Cheap Books

While the bulk of what you read will likely be through your ereader's dedicated store, you have a ton of different options for loading up your ereader with free ebooks. Kindle owners with Amazon Prime get the excellent Kindle Lending Library, but that's exclusive to people who own Kindles (not the apps on other devices).

If you have a library card, the OverDrive library allows you to "check out" digital books on a wide range of devices. But, just like a regular library, they have a limited amount that they can license at a time. Also, like the Kindle Lending Library, Overdrive is exclusive to just a handful of devices.

If you just want to dig through a bunch of different free ebooks that'll work on any ereader, One Hundred Free Books, Open Culture, Hundred Zeros, and Project Gutenberg are all great places to start. If you're more into the idea of swapping books with friends (and strangers) you can do that as well on sites like Ebook Fling.

If you're not finding anything free you want to read, you still have a lot of options for cheap books. Amazon's ebook and daily deals often have a lot of great prices, as does the Nook Daily Find. For another approach, the Story Bundle offers up a collection of books at a pay-what-you-want price point.

Push Any Article You Find Online to Your Ereader

One of the best features of any ereader is how great text looks compared to a computer screen. Because of that, pushing long form articles you find online from your browser to your ereader makes for a much more pleasant reading experience.

Kindle owners can do this easily with the Send to Kindle extension for Firefox and Chrome. With just a click you can strip the formatting away from articles and send them directly to your Kindle.

Other ebook readers require a little more effort to get articles you find online on your ereader. The simplest way to do this is to convert articles into books with the free software Calibre and an Instapaper or Pocket account. First, set up an account with the bookmarking service of choice and save any articles you want to send to your ereader. Then the process is pretty simple to send it from the bookmarking service to your ereader:

1. Open up Calibre and click the "Fetch News" button.
2. Search for your bookmarking service of choice.
3. Enter in your login information and click save.
4. Click "Download all scheduled" and your bookmarked articles will load into Calibre.
5. Connect your ereader, select the articles you want to send, rick click them, and select "Send to Device.

With that, your bookmarked articles should transfer over to your ereader so you can read them whenever you like.

Send Any Document You Want to Your Ereader, Find Deals, Integrate with Google Reader and More with If This Then That

We're big fans of the webapp If This Then That. With IFTTT you can do all sorts of things, like send articles from a Dropbox account to your Kindle, or get notified of free books. Here are a few of our favorites:

The big benefit here is instantly sending files over to your ereader. This eliminates the need for paper in a lot of circumstances. You can load up your ereader with meeting notes, speech notes, and pretty much anything else you need to read on the go.

Jailbreak or Root Your Ereader and Turn It Into Something Else Entirely

If you want to get a few more features from your ereader then it's time to root or jailbreak it. The process is incredibly easy on a Nook, and once you're done you can add a few great apps to it to add even more functionality.

The Kindle is just as easy to jailreak. Once it's jailbroken, you can do all kinds of neat stuff with it, like, convert it into a display for a Raspberry Pi, turn it into a weather display, or just jailbreak so you can customize the screensaver (your address/phone number would be good here).

You can do a lot more with an ereader than just read books and with a little effort you can turn it into a powerful little media consumption machine.

Sincerely,
Lifehacker

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