coffeeblack :: Kindlize your PDFs

Kindlize your PDFs

Posted: December 18, 2011

: A kindlized PDF displayed with title and author in Kindle search results

I need to read a lot of academic papers for work, so I got a Kindle 3 to make them more portable. The latest PDF reader on the Kindle is tolerable when you’re trading it against carrying around a mountain of paper.

But one annoyance is that the default behavior is to display PDFs by filename. This might be OK when you only have a few PDFs, but since I use it pretty much exclusively for PDF reading and have hundreds of them, it quickly became unmanageable to remember how they are all named. Luckily, the Kindle 3 is able to display PDFs in its menus using the same title/author format it uses for other document types as long as the appropriate PDF metadata is present.

Kindlize is a quick way to add this metadata to your PDFs that does not require any expensive or difficult-to-obtain software. It has a command-line interface, so you can use it even in the most bare-bones setting. You just run Kindlize over your PDFs before transfering them to the device, and the Kindle 3 displays them just like any other document. You can also search for them using the full title or author’s name rather than having to remember the filename you chose for the PDF.