A Student's Guide to Using the Kindle for Research

The Kindle is great for reading the occasional book, but you might not know that it's also a fantastic tool for students. When used correctly, it can essentially operate as a portable tool to keep all your books, notes, and research in one place. Here's how to turn a Kindle into your new best friend for school.

First things first, you'll need a Kindle or one of the Kindle apps for Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, or Windows Phone. Since the Kindle is easily the most popular ereader, we decided to concentrate on its features here, but many of these tips apply to other ereaders or reading apps.

Embrace Textbook Rentals, Library Books, and Free Books

A Student's Guide to Using the Kindle for Research

Kindle digital textbooks are usually cheaper to buy than physical textbooks, but you don't get the benefit of selling them back to the bookstore at the end of the semester. So, if you're on the fence about buying your books on your Kindle—don't buy them. In a lot of cases, you can rent them, grab the book you need from the library, or if you're majoring in literature, get most of your textbooks for free.

Amazon's textbook rental is a consistent way to get cheap ebooks since nearly every textbook is available as a rental. These rentals work just as you'd expect: instead of purchasing a book outright, you rent it. After a set number of days, the ebook won't be accessible from your device. These are usually about a third of the price of buying the ebook. For example, this copy of Shigley's Mechanical Engineering Design is $93 to buy the ebook, or about $62 to rent it through May. To compare, the physical hardcover is $207 new, and most of the legit used copies sell for around $175-$200. If you have no interest in keeping your textbooks around after the semester is over, renting them on a Kindle saves you a pretty massive chunk of cash.

If you're truly lucky, you can snag free copies of your textbooks from your library. We've talked about library rentals before and if your local library participates, you can often score free copies of textbooks this way. Just search Overdrive for the book you need, and if it's available from your library you can check it out with your library card number. Unfortunately, Shigley's Mechanical Engineering Design isn't available, but many textbooks are.

Finally, a lot of those classic books you have to read in college are public domain. This means they're free, and if you're in a literature, philosophy, or history class sifting through public domain books on Project Gutenberg is an excellent way to save a ton of money. Likewise, you can find free books in a number of fields. For example, this list on GitHub is a great place to find free books to get your education started.

Send Your Other Readings to Kindle

A Student's Guide to Using the Kindle for Research

Regardless of what your major is, you're probably reading more than just textbooks. Thankfully, you can send all your digital reading materials to your Kindle using Amazon's Send to Kindle service. Send to Kindle can send articles from a website to to your Kindle with a click in Chrome or Firefox, or you can send documents (including Word documents) from your computer or email address. You can even forward emails, your syllabus, and your schedule from your professors over to your Kindle if you need to. It's incredibly handy consolidate all your reading materials into one place, so make use of the Send to Kindle feature whenever you can.

Highlight What Matters and Take Notes

A Student's Guide to Using the Kindle for Research

One of the Kindle's best features is the ability to highlight and take notes in any book. Even better, you can see what others have highlighted and where they've written notes.

Highlighting blocks of text lets you create your own collection of terms and ideas you want to return and study later. To highlight, just tap a word and drag the cursor across the entire section you want to highlight. On the tablet apps, you can then select different highlight colors to help organize notes within a book. For example, you could use different highlight colors for different tests to make it easier on yourself when you're reviewing those highlights later. You can also see where other people have highlighted in the book by turning on popular highlights. Just head into your Kindle's Settings and turn on "Popular Highlights." You'll see these highlights as dotted underlines in your book.

Likewise, you can also add your own notes directly in your book at any point as well. Just tap and hold the place where you want to make a note and select the note option. Type your note in and it saves it in the book and online so you can access it from anywhere.

Your highlights and notes are always available on your Kindle itself and online here, so it's an incredibly powerful tool for studying because you can easily share your highlights with friends in your class. You can even send those highlights over to Evernote if you like or just snag the plain text file directly from your Kindle.

Organize Your Books with Collections

A Student's Guide to Using the Kindle for Research

Collections are a subtle feature, but it's worth mentioning since it's not the most noticeable feature on the Kindle. As the name suggests, Collections allow you to organize your books in any way you see fit. Since the Kindle doesn't have a way to organize your digital shelves, Collections lets you group all your books together by class, research project, or however else you like. It's incredibly helpful if you have a lot of ebooks or documents and you need to find them quickly.

To create a collection, head into the Collections menu, tap the "+" sign, and add any books you want. You can organize them and add more books over time.

Use X-Ray and Smart Lookup to Learn More About Any Topic

A Student's Guide to Using the Kindle for Research

The Smart Lookup and X-Ray features are easily my favorite tools on the Kindle because they allow you to read more about any given topic, without even leaving the page you're on (or switching to another app on the tablet versions).

Smart lookup is simple: just tap on a word and the Kindle will look up the dictionary and Wikipedia definition. This makes it so you can instantly research a word without losing your place in the book.

Lookup is great for simple concepts, but X-Ray does the same basic thing using just the text you're reading. Tap the X-Ray button in the app (or tap on a word and then select "X-Ray" on the Kindle) and you're shown a list of where the word appears in the book you're reading. You get a summation from Wikipedia, but more importantly, you can look up other places important terms and characters appear in the text. So, if you're reading about Abraham Lincoln, you can instantly see where else he's mentioned in the book in front of you, key concepts like "absentee ballots," or "The Battle of Antietam," and other important people like Abner Doubleday or Carl Schurz. Basically, if you're reading a textbook with a lot of complicated terms, or a lot of different important people, X-Ray makes it easy to keep track of those all those terms.

If you really want to drill those words home, you can make your own set of flash cards in certain books. When you're looking at an X-Ray page for a print replica textbook (books will list this in their description if they retain the rich formatting of the hardcopy book), just tap the flash card button and your Kindle will automatically create a series of flash cards you can use to test yourself on a glossary of terms. Likewise, if you've been highlighting and adding notes to your textbooks, you can turn those notes into flash cards are well.

X-Ray and flash cards are special features in certain books, so they're not available all the time, but when they are, they're worth using.

Ebooks are nice because you don't have to lug around your giant backpack with six textbooks in it every single day, but they're also fantastic study tools when they're used to their full potential. Since everything you do in a Kindle book syncs to the apps on desktop and mobile, as well as the Kindle itself, you'll always have your most important notes and highlights with you. This is a pretty great feature if you're the type to forget school materials at home a lot. Plus, used correctly, a Kindle might even save you money on textbooks in the long run.

Image by UBC Library.