Originally Posted by
ShannonM
If you have a Kindle, or really any e-reader, but especially if you have a Kindle, you need a software package called Calibre. Not only does it "jailbreak" your Kindle, allowing you to load e-books into it other than by buying them from Amazon, but it allows you to convert e-books into and out of Amazon's AZW3 format, which nothing else uses, and which your Kindle uses exclusively. You can also get your books off of your Kindle, which Amazon won't let you do. Basically, it turns your Kindle and your library into things that you actually own.
--Shannon
I haven't found Calibre able to unlock those Amazon purchases that are copy-protected, but I think you may be able "own" Amazon books that are in the public domain. For those, a better, free source is Gutenberg.org. Calibre also allows conversion of e-books from one format to another and does a pretty good job of converting PDF docs into Kindle formats. If you want to read while touring, Kindle is a good idea, although on the one I have the graphics are generally poor. Still, you can load it with anything you want and the weight doesn't change, and you can backlight it for night reading. Although, I'm usually too tired or too hungry to want to read.