I still couldn’t connect my or my wife’s Kindle to my phone. Unfortunately, the personal hotspot doesn’t work when you’re roaming on someone else’s cell network. That was a bargain and worth it to get our books. But that would mean turning on roaming and connecting to the local cellular network.īefore I did that, though, I did a little research and found that my Verizon plan covered limited roaming service for just $10 a day. I recalled using my iPhone 14 Pro’s Personal Hotspot to connect my Kindle and download books. With my wife and I pages from finishing our books, our miscalculation threatened to derail a core component of our vacation experience. No luck, the browser couldn’t open the authentication page. Lesson: Queueing is not the same as downloading.įine, we’d log in to the hotel network through her brand-new Kindle. Her Kindle informed her she would need to exit Airplane Mode to download the book. We then navigated to the books my wife had queued up for the remainder of our trip and she tapped the Kindle screen to open one of them. My wife initially chuckled at my pain, telling me I should’ve downloaded the books before I left home like she did…or thought she did. They’re slow and not useful for anything except logging into new networks. Granted, Kindle Web browsers are of the experimental variety and can get tripped up by more complex coding.

No matter what I tried, the Kindle’s browser could not open the page. Like a lot of public and business wireless networks, though, this one asked you to log in through a web page. The Kindle had no trouble seeing the network. This time, obviously, I’d have to hop on the hotel Wi-Fi. Normally at this point, I open my Kindle, take it out of Airplane Mode, connect to my local network, and download my books from the cloud. I found a book on Libby, checked it out from my library, and then followed the process that takes you through the Amazon store where you send your checked-out book to your Kindle device of choice. (Image credit: Lance Ulanoff) How could I be so dumb?Īs I plowed through the remainder of the gripping The World Played Chess (opens in new tab) by Robert Dugoni, I decided to find my next beach read.

Libby on kindle paperwhite