Amazon combines Cloud Drive and Kindle documents, giving you 10GB combined free storage

Amazon Cloud Drive (teaser 001)

If you own a Kindle, check your Amazon Cloud Drive: you should now have ten gigabytes of cloud-based storage, twice as much as before.

On Wednesday, Amazon emailed its Kindle customers to let them know their Kindle documents had been integrated with their Cloud Drive, resulting in a combined ten gigs of free Amazon Cloud Drive storage.

The welcomed change applies to Kindle customers only, who can now use their combined account to store not only Kindle documents, but photos, videos and other file types as well…

Cloud Drive normally offers five gigabytes of free storage.

Your Cloud Drive stuff can be accessed via the browser or using the rather clunky CloudDrive OS X app which requires a Java SE 6 runtime. If you have issues accessing your Cloud Drive in Safari, use Google Chrome instead.

According to Charlie Sorrel of Cult of Mac, this integration between Kindle documents and Cloud Drive works one way only.

If you load personal documents onto your Kindle, those documents will now be available in your free Cloud Drive, ready to access in the web site. But if you want to do it the other way, uploading the documents to the My Send-To-Kindle Docs folder and then sending them to your Kindle, you’re out of luck.

You’re still stuck mailing the things in (if you want Whispersync to work) or just dumping them onto all your devices via USB (without Whispersync support).

Although Amazon automatically converts common document file types like Microsoft Word and .TXT to Kindle-friendly formats, the original files still get stored in your Cloud Drive.

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I don’t own a Kindle so my Cloud Drive is still languishing back on the 5GB free tier.

The online retail giant has a nicely done iPhone and iPad app, free in the App Store, for your Cloud Drive Photos. The software has been redesigned for iOS 7 earlier this week, adding new features such as Timeline and more.

Amazon is rumored to launch its smartphone soon and Cloud Drive should be a big part of that, just like Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets and the new Fire TV set-top box are tied to the Amazon cloud.