Downloading the Kindle for PC is the fastest and easiest ways to enjoy the free reader. You can load the Kindle for PC on a laptop and let your child sit back in a chair and read any of the thousands of free children's books that are available.
However, if you intend on letting your kids use the Kindle for PC on their own, there are a few important considerations to consider just to properly set up the software and also protect your financial information already stored on Amazon.
Kindle Main Page
The simplicity of the application lends itself well to use by children for reading ebooks. The Kindle for PC simply displays a main screen with all of the books that you've purchased. You can also define the device on your Amazon account so that only the children's books that you download are displayed on the laptop that the kids use to read.
To look for new books to read, you or your child can click on the "Shop in Kindle Store" button. This opens up the web browser and goes directly to the web page where you can search for and find free children's ebooks.
Searching for Free Ebooks
The Kindle Store is focused primarily on selling ebooks, not giving them away for free. However, there are volumes of free ebooks available for download. It's just a matter of knowing where to look. First, under Kindle eBooks in the category listing to the left, you can click on "Children's eBooks" to find all of the books available for children. These cover a wide assortment of topics, authors and genres.
Free Kindle eBooks for Children
The children's ebook page is filled with lots of ebooks available for download, but it still focuses mostly on books that cost money to download. However, it's easy enough to find the free ebooks by looking at the right side of the screen under "Top 100 Free". That list is updated hourly, so you'll always find wonderful new ebooks that you or your children can download for free.
Adding Ebooks
For example, here is one ebook that's free to download called "Sophie's World" by Nancy Rue. The book is normally $6.99, but Amazon offers it as a free Kindle download. All you have to do in order to download it to your reader is to click on "Buy now with 1-Click" and it immediately loads into the Kindle reader on the device that you specify.
Book Display in the Kindle for PC
When you go back to your Kindle for PC application, you'll discover the book you just "purchased" sitting on the home page. Eventually, this book will move to the "Archived Items" tab, but when you first download a book it always appears on the home page. All you have to do if you want to read it is double click on the picture of the book.
Reading the Ebooks
Any time the child wants to read any of the ebooks loaded into the Kindle for PC reader, all they have to do is double click on the icon for any of those books. The reading format can be either single page or double page mode. In either case, the letters are sufficiently large so that it's comfortable to read the book, even on a computer screen. All images and diagrams are displayed exactly as they appear in the book. Flipping through pages is as easy as clicking on the arrow on either side of the book, or using the arrow keys on the keyboard to flip back and forth.
Avoid Accidental Charges!
One thing to keep in mind when you use the Kindle to encourage your children to read books on the PC, is the fact that if they want to they could go into Amazon and order any of the ebooks that they want to. At a cost ranging from $2 to $20, that could get rather expensive. The way to prevent this is to go into your online Kindle account and click on the "Manage Your Kindle" link at the top of the page. Scroll down to the section where you can limit your document charge, and make sure that you've set it to $0.00. This way your child can't accidentally order any ebooks that aren't free.
Storage Directory for Ebooks
As another good security precaution, within the Kindle for PC, you have the ability to configure where the downloaded ebooks are stored. By setting it up to download those ebooks into a directory that you can quickly check (like a shared directory on your family desktop PC), you can easily monitor all of the free ebooks that your child is downloading.
All of the features of the Kindle for PC really lend itself as the perfect application for children. Since kids love using the computer these days, why not give them something to do other than arcade games or Internet surfing? Using the computer to download children's ebooks is a fun way to keep reading exciting and interesting for kids.
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