Moving your Mac Address Book to the Kindle Fire

Once you’ve set up your Kindle Fire with email, you’re probably going to want to get your Address Book moved over as well — after all, if you’re a person with a lot of friends or business associates, it’s impossible to remember everyone’s email address or phone number.

In this post, I’ll talk about something I’m familiar with — the Mac Address Book — and how to move the contents to your Fire. I’ll follow up with a Windows-related post soon.

You need to begin this process on your Mac. Launch Address Book, and then select Edit > Select All. This highlights all of the contacts you have in your address book at once, which is much better than exporting the addresses one by one! Now choose File > Export > Export vCard. Select a location to save your vCard file, which will contain all of the information in your Mac Address Book, and then click Save.

You should have a file named vCards now. That’s what we’re going to import into the Kindle Fire. Take a USB to micro-USB cable, plug it into your Mac on one end and the Fire on the other end. Your Kindle will display a screen telling you that “You can now transfer files from your computer to Kindle.” This is accompanied by a disk icon on the Mac desktop onto which you want to drag your vCards file and drop it. This copies the vCards file to the internal memory of the Kindle Fire. Once the copy is complete, you can just drag the Kindle disk icon to the trash to unmount it from the Mac.

Now go back to the Kindle Fire. Find the Contacts app (hint, the icon looks like an address book) and tap it to launch it. If you haven’t added any contacts, you’ll see a screen that looks something like this:

 

Tap the menu button at the bottom center of the Fire’s display, and tap the Import/Export button:

 

The Kindle now asks which vCard file you want to import:

 

Unless you have more than one vCard file that you’ve exported, select “Import one vCard file,” and tap the OK button. Now the Fire wants to know whether you want to import or export the file:

Tap “Import from internal storage” and the Fire displays any files with vCard in the name. The one you’re looking for is the file without the “._” in front of it. Tap the vCards.vcf file to select it, and then tap OK to continue.

 

The contacts are now being imported. You’ll see a progress bar showing how many people and companies have been imported into the Contacts app.

 

When it’s done, you can either start looking through your names and addresses, or you can change the way that the Contacts app displays the contacts. I wasn’t happy with the fact that it was displaying names sorted by first name, so I tapped the menu button, tapped Settings, and then chose to sort the list by last name.

This is a fast and fun way to move all of those names, addresses, and phone numbers to your Kindle Fire. Let us know if you have any questions about this process.