Amazon just quietly introduced a handy new web portal, kindle.amazon.com, where you can log in and view your list of books. What really makes it useful, however, is each book automatically lists any notes or highlights you’ve added while reading it. Now instead of having to access those things from the device via a USB cable, you can simply log in, then read or copy-and-paste as needed.

There’s also a handy “manage your Kindle” link at the top of the page, so you can bookmark this URL and use it to quickly access your device’s email addresses, downloads, etc.

Amazon has updated their Kindle app for the iPhone and iPod Touch to provide a few small improvements, like landscape view and a couple of new color settings. I appreciate the beige/brown option, but I really wish Amazon would roll out some more significant updates, like the ability to make and read notes, highlight text, and receive magazine subscriptions. I read from my iPhone about as much as from my Kindle these days, and really notice the reduced functionality.

Oh well. Gripe gripe gripe. Launch the App Store on your iPhone/Touch and grab the Kindle app or update. They’re both free.

By the way, if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch and read ebooks, you should really download the free Kindle app even if you don’t own a Kindle, because the Amazon store has the cheapest ebooks you’ll find online. (Yes, they’re locked to your device via DRM, but unfortunately this is the case for all ebook stores.)

If you’ve ever tried looking for cheap, high quality books on the Amazon Kindle store, you’ve probably run into the same frustrating limitations that I have–namely, that you can’t set a specific price floor or upper limit when you perform a search. There are so many titles on the Kindle Store that it’s not practical to manually browse, screen by screen, through the listings. To make matters worse, you can’t filter out self-published, amateur, and public domain (aka “can be found for free elsewhere”) titles that junk up the listings.

Well, guess what? You can sort by specific price ranges if you use Jungle-Search.com!

This third-party website will let you narrow down your search to a particular book category, then set a price range, and then sort the results by the standard Amazon sort options. You can even filter out low-rated books if you trust the Amazon community rating system enough (I don’t).

I used Jungle-Search this morning to find Stephen King’s Duma Key for $7.99. I only read Stephen King novels every once in a while, but I think he makes for good summer reading, and I was happy to find one of his more widely-acclaimed books at such a reasonable price. Even better, the text-to-speech isn’t disabled on it, unlike some other Stephen King titles, so I had no qualms about grabbing it for my Kindle.

If you know of any other good ways to find discounted books on the Amazon Kindle store, please add them to the comments below.

If you read a lot of online content, you need to know about Kindlefeeder, because it will drastically improve your reading experience on the Kindle. Kindlefeeder does two things extraordinarily well:

• It lets you pick up to 30 rss feeds from blogs, magazines, whatever you can find online that you like to read, and it converts those into a single document with full navigation and lets you wirelessly send it to your Kindle on a schedule you determine;
• It lets you copy and paste any text you find online into a simple form and, with one button press, send it wirelessly to your Kindle.

Thanks to Kindlefeeder, I get a little giddy when I pick up my Kindle each morning and see that day’s new blog feeds waiting for me. It would cost me well over $50 to “subscribe” to this many blogs through the Kindle store, if I could even find all of them on their store, which I can’t.

Option 2 is a real time saver for me. I subscribe to the print version of The New Yorker, but of course I’d much rather read each issue on my Kindle. Currently I have to look through the print issue for articles I’m interested in, go to their website and download the full text, paste it into a Word doc and clean up the formatting, save it and email it to my Kindle. With Kindlefeeder, I can skip the last three steps–I just copy the full text of the article, paste it into the Kindlefeeder form, and hit send.

The service is an extension of Kindlefeeds, which was created by Daniel Choi so that he could download RSS feeds into a format suitable for his Kindle. In fact, if you know what you’re doing with computers, he’s distributing the code here so that you can set up your own private Kindlefeeder if you like.

Visit Kindlefeeder.

Stanza is an iPhone app that lets you read public domain books on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Why do you, a Kindle owner, care? Because the company behind Stanza is working on a desktop version of the app (OS X and Windows only, no Linux, boo) that not only greatly improves the PC reading experience, but also lets you convert any text you’re reading into the Kindle format without having to use Mobipocket Creator.
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