The Amazon Kindle Colorsoft has a massive issue for those who want to read PDFs in full colour. If you use Calibre on the PC or another workaround for the MAC, the PDF will only show up in black and white and not in colour. The same issue exists if you plugin the Kindle Colorsoft into the USB port and transfer the PDF by dragging and dropping. This is a severe blow to customers who wanted the Kindle Colorsoft to view and edit PDFs on the first Kindle e-reader with a colour E INK screen. No matter what you do, a PDF will only appear in black and white, which is not ideal. There is no indication that this is a bug. Luckily, there is a workaround.
The only way to load a PDF file and display it in full colour is to use Send to Kindle. The Send to Kindle app for PC, Chrome Extension and email only support a 50MB file. This paltry amount is not ideal for hundreds of pages, such as academic journals, textbooks, Dungeons and Dragons manuals or super complex documents. Amazon does have Kindle for WEB, which does support a 200MB PDF, which should suit the vast majority of people just fine.
It is essential to know that the only way to load a PDF file on your Kindle Colorsoft e-reader and display it in full colour is to use Send to Kindle. No other method will work.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.