1. How can I make sure that patrons cannot purchase books on the library account?
One solution is to create a special library account just for your Kindle purchases. Register your Kindles to this account, but do not store the credit card information online at Amazon. With no credit card information available, patrons would not be able to purchase anything on your account. Keeping the Kindles registered means that you could add material to the Kindle while it is "in the field." When you need to purchase something, use your credit card, but be sure that it is not stored to the account afterward.

A second option is to de-register the Kindles when they are checked out. Amazon Kindle customer service warns that registering and de-registering a Kindle too often could result in a temporary loss of titles on the Kindle. This could be easily remedied by sending the titles back to the Kindle from your Amazon account, where they are always backed up.

2. If I purchase a Kindle book, how many Kindles can I load it onto?
This varies by book and the information is not publicly available. Contact Amazon Kindle customer service to determine how many licenses come with a given title. Six seems to be a norm, but many specialty titles come with fewer licenses. You will discover how many licenses you have (or rather, don't have) when you try to add a title to a registered Kindle and get a message saying that the title cannot be sent to that device.

3. How can I load PDFs and other personal documents on my Kindle?
Kindle DX has the ability to view PDFs, but for Kindle 1 and 2 this remains experimental. There are many instructions available on the internet for converting documents, including instructions at Amazon and a blog post and video on irreaderreview. Mobipocket Creator is very good for converting and formatting many kinds of documents, and we used it at the Duke Medical Center Library for converting Word documents so that we could control more of the metadata (specifically the author field, so that we could use it as a sorting option on the Kindle home screen.)

For the most part, anything with a fixed layout is going to prove problematic in the conversion process. This includes Word and HTML documents with tables. It is best to remove the tables and reformat the material prior to conversion. Another solution is to make an image of the table and insert it into the document in place of the original table. Images can then be zoomed on Kindle for easy legibility.