clouddriveAmazon this morning rolled out a new connection between Amazon Cloud Drive and its Kindle e-readers and tablets — creating an automated folder in the cloud storage service that contains all of the personal documents Kindle users have sent to their devices.

As an added bonus, the 5GB of storage allotted to Kindle Personal Documents has now been added to the existing 5GB of storage available for free through Cloud Drive, effectively doubling the available storage space in Cloud Drive.

The move makes those documents more accessible for Kindle users and exposes Cloud Drive to a larger set of Amazon customers. That’s an important step for Amazon as the company competes against the likes of Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive and other cloud services.

Users will still need to use a Send to Kindle app or plugin to sync documents to their devices. At least based on our testing this morning, uploading a document directly into the “My Send-to-Kindle Docs” folder in Cloud Drive doesn’t make the document available for viewing on a Kindle device. Instead, the folder serves as a repository for documents that are synced to the Kindle separately.

Another limitation: Web pages synced to a Kindle are visible can’t be opened from within Cloud Drive directly.

Here’s the email message that Amazon sent to users with more details on the changes.

Personal documents are now in Amazon Cloud Drive: Starting today, all personal documents that you have archived in your Kindle Library will be available to access, delete, organize, and share from your Amazon Cloud Drive. You can see these documents in a new “My Send-to-Kindle Docs” folder alongside all of your saved content such as photos and personal videos.

There is no action required on your part. Your personal documents features will continue to work just as they have in the past. And as always, you can use Manage Your Kindle to see a list of your documents, re-deliver them to Kindle devices and free reading apps, delete them, or turn off auto-saving of documents to the cloud. Documents will be delivered just as they have in the past and you will continue to have 5 GB of free cloud storage for your personal documents. Just “Send Once, Read Everywhere.”

Documents stored in their native format: Also starting today, new documents that you save to the cloud with Send to Kindle will be stored in their native format (e.g. MS Word, TXT) so you can access them anywhere from Amazon Cloud Drive.

Like what you're reading? Subscribe to GeekWire's free newsletters to catch every headline

Job Listings on GeekWork

Find more jobs on GeekWork. Employers, post a job here.