Do you own a Kindle and you’ve been getting frustrated because your Amazon Cloud Drive is full with videos and pictures, and you’re unable to put the Kindles Document’s 5 GB of available storage to good use? Good news! You’ll be glad to find out that Amazon have now merged your Cloud Drive and Kindle Documents storage into one combined product making a grand total of 10GB of free storage under the Cloud Drive moniker. The bad news is that this merging of the clouds is only available to Kindle owners, with non Kindle owners still restricted to the basic package of 5GB of Cloud Drive storage, unless they purchase an upgrade in storage. The change should roll out to everyone that is eligible as the day goes on, with Amazon notifications of eligibility via email, although despite not receiving an email, when I checked my Cloud Drive a few minutes ago, the merge had already occurred as you can see in the pictures below.
While the merging of the two entities isn’t a big deal in itself, and 10GB of online storage isn’t a huge amount, it does mean that Kindle owners will have access to a more robust set of cloud management tools than they previously did with Kindle Documents which were stodgy and decidedly old-fashioned. The merging means that Kindle users will be able to access all of their stored documents, pictures, videos,etc. in one location. All their documents will be transferred over to Cloud Drive, with any future documents sent via the Send-to-Kindle email being saved in their original format. It may also mean that the Kindle Documents brand will be shuffling off into the ether, now that Cloud Drive has been chosen as the collective name for Amazon’s cloud storage.
This mirrors Google’s actions in May 2013 which saw the merging of Gmail’s and Google Drive’s storage into one easy to manage solution, and makes sense in many ways, both for Amazon and for (Kindle owning) consumers. Let us know if the merging of Amazon’s Cloud Drive and Kindle Documents has been applied to your account yet, and whether you think this is a good thing in the comments below or via our Google Plus page.