Two of the Kindle’s most appealing features are its wireless connection, which lets you download new books any time of the day from most places in the US, and the rapidly expanding treasure trove of ebooks available on Amazon. So it’s a sad, sad day when you switch on your Kindle’s wireless and get…nothing. No bars, no signal, no Whispernet, no instant access to that literary treasure chest.

What’s a Kindler to do when her wireless is kaput?

There are several possibilities to explore:

1. Your location.
2. Kindle hardware and software glitches.
3. The problem’s with Amazon.
4. Your wireless is kaput.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to troubleshooting Kindle wireless problems.

First things first

Your wireless probably isn’t kaput.

I know that having the Kindle wireless die completely is something many Kindlers worry about; after all, this is brand new technology and the company’s first hardware product - who knows how reliable it is and what sort of longevity we can expect?

Chances are, though, that even if you can’t get a signal for a whole day or for several days in a row, the wireless in your Kindle hasn’t died, but that something else is afoot. There are several other possibilities worth investigating first.

1. Are you in Kindle’s wireless coverage area? 

Amazon’s Whispernet comes to you courtesy of Sprint’s EVDO network, so you can only use your Kindle’s wireless when you’re in the network’s coverage area.

As you’ll see from the map, urban coverage is pretty good (orange indicates high-speed, green areas get lower-speed connections), but rural folk are left off the map in many places. (Click the image to visit the Kindle coverage map online, where you can search for a particular address.)

Even if you are under Whispernet’s spell, all sorts of things can have an effect on the signal. Bad weather, hills and dales, other wireless devices in your house, that concrete bunker you’re in. Try moving about, going outside or just waiting until the storm passes, then check your connection once more.

2. Is your Kindle having a bad hair day? 

Your Kindle is like most computing devices: sometimes it’ll stop working temporarily, usually for no apparent reason. The simplest solution is often the most effective: turn it off and then back on again.

• Flick both the power and wireless switches to the off position, wait a few seconds, then switch them both back on.
• Sometimes switching the wireless on is not enough; you won’t get a connection until you actually try to connect. Give the Kindle a nudge to go online by clicking the menu button and choosing Shop In Kindle Store.

Still no signal? You may be tempted to try pushing the reset button on the back of your Kindle (under the cover). The word from Amazon is: Don’t! It’s not likely to help, and when you press the reset button, troubleshooting info stored on your Kindle, which might potentially help with fixing errors on your device, is erased.

3. The problem’s at Amazon’s end

The Whispernet is not infallible. Sometimes it silently disappears for a while, then just as quietly returns after five minutes, five hours or even longer.

If you’ve tried various physical solutions and your Kindle is still wireless-less, try patience. It usually works. I’ve had no connection on a fair few occasions - one time for two days - but the signal has always returned.

If your Kindle is brand new, there’s another possibility: Amazon failed to register it properly on its network. If you’ve just received your Kindle and the wireless won’t work at all, give the Kindle support line a call on 1-866-321-8851 to make sure everything’s hunky dory.

4. Your Kindle’s wireless really is dead

If you’ve run through this troubleshooting checklist and you still can’t get a wireless connection within the Whispernet coverage area, your wireless really may be kaput.

If your Kindle is less than a year old (and as I write this, all Kindles are) give the Kindle hotline a call: 1-866-321-8851 from within the US, 1-206-266-0927 if you’re calling from afar.

Other solutions? 

Have you found a different solution to your Whispernet problem? If so, please share it by leaving a comment.

I’ve been resisting Twitter because I thought the signal-to-noise ratio might be so bad it’d be unbearable. But with the NTEN (Non-profit Technical Network) conference about to take off in New Orleans next week and many NTENers planning to use Twitter as a backchannel for the conference, I decided I better get on board. Of course, now I’ve been completely seduced.

The seduction started almost immediately. I decided to follow one of the NTEN conference participants and immediately discovered a bunch of little gems in her tweets. Links to interesting sites; a new and interesting beta program just opening up; some news about another conference I couldn’t attend. Within minutes of starting to use it, Twitter had already paid off. It’d be incredibly easy to be swamped by Twitter, but a little discernment in who you follow makes all the difference.

I’ve been wondering how I’ll use Twitter at the conference. I’ll be lugging my laptop with me and I’ll have my cell phone, and Twitter is accessible using either of them. But I’ll need to ration my laptop use to preserve my battery (a conference with 1000 techheads in attendance - just imagine the competition for power outlets!) and I prefer not to receive tweets via SMS. So it dawned on me that I have another alternative: my Kindle. It’s comfortably portable, not very power hungry even with the wireless switched on, has a web browser built in and a keyboard for sending Twitter updates.

I’m not a great fan of the Kindle’s web browser, but that’s probably because I am yet to be convinced of the appeal of viewing any web site on a tiny screen. Still, one of the great virtues of Twitter is the tweets are short - 140 characters and that’s it. And there’s a Twitter mobile site, m.twitter.com, which winnows away all the excess fluff from the normal Twitter site and leaves you with a clean list of tweets and links. That seems like an ideal sort of site for Kindle-based viewing.

So I loaded up Kindle’s browser (you get to it by clicking Menu in the Home screen and then selecting Experimental -> Basic Web) and typed in m.twitter.com. After logging in - probably the hardest part of the whole deal - there was a lovely, clean list of my tweets and the tweets of people I’m following. I added my home page to the Kindle bookmarks, a bookmark for the “People You Follow” page, and jumped over to the NTEN conference group (08ntc) and bookmarked that, too. Then I sent a tweet using the keyboard - quick and sweet.

Accessing links on the Kindle entails scrolling to the text containing the links and clicking - you’re then offered a list of all the links in that piece of text and you can scroll and click the one you need. It’s a little clunky, but quick enough to use, especially with Twitter’s condensed style. In fact, Twitter is probably one of the best fits for Kindle’s dumbed-down browser.

So I’ll head off to the NTEN conference next week with the Kindle in hand. I’ll report back on the experience. By the way, you can find me here on Twitter.