Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

My mother "won" a 3rd ed. Kindle from some business supplier raffle (ie, bribery), and as she's not too keen on the printed word I suspect it will remain in my possession for some time.

The screen contrast on the 3rd edn is much, much better than that on my 2 year old 2nd gen (the claimed 50% improvement may be an understatement), but I find the dimensions (less easy to hold without inadvertently paging) and control setup (no dedicated # keys) somewhat inferior. All in all, I wouldn't have paid for the upgrade, as I prefer recycled dead-tree books when not traveling, but thought I'd offer the hands-on comparison for those still on the fence.

E-Ink Pearl is the display manufacturer's name, and seems to incorporate some phosphorescent pigment that absolutely glows under my bedside full-spectrum fluorescent reading lamp. I'd recommend waiting for the upgrade for those looking at non-Amazon, non-Sony devices.

^^ display manufacturer's name for this iteration of the screen technology,

kindle internet is like being online in 1983, a combination of etcha-sketch and atari 2600.

not a grumble, mind. to be able to check my facebook/email in a wifi cafe is a brilliant added bonus

recently went through all the freebie articles on rocksbackpages, instapapered them, about 100 in total only to find they aren't listed with the article title or interviewee. just gives the generic 'rocksbackpages articles' title for each and everyone one. frustrating so mailed them about it and fingers crossed they'll be fixing it soon.

related qu: is there a way of logging into instapaper on the kindle internet and downloading a mobi file of the top 20 articles there and then? also a way of using 'read later' on it - i imagine putting the java 'read later' stuff in a bookmark would work for this, anyone tried it?

If you have a kindle 3, you can send stuff wirelessly to your kindle and not have to pay a surcharge (use your "free.kindle.com" email address). Works great for Instapaper, I hear.
― schwantz, Tuesday, December 14, 2010 2:35 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I take it the only reason you'd ever not do this would be because you have a kindle 1 or 2?

what a wieldy sentence

only thing putting me off getting one of these right now is the fact that the book prices are more expensive than their paperback editions.

send to kindle <3

Really about to buy one of these but there's noise about a price drop.

guy in work just brought his in. i'm impressed by the screen res, was expected more pixelated for some reason.

smaller screen than i thought too, but don't think it's an issue

he's managed to get a load of books, and most of them unpaid for, which i'm beginning to see is perhaps not a great thing. so if there's already rife piracy in this, will it have a future?

might still get one though

Small screen is offset by portability, and the fact that most paperbacks are about that big anyway. E-ink pixellation in general is reduced because there's no backlight.

It's definitely got a future because you can buy books on the device, which is loads easier than (a) trying to find the book you want on the darknet, (b) actually locating a copy that's not full of scanning errors and (c) editing the bloody thing until the chapter marks work. If the price of the book is right there's no need to bother with alternatives.

btw I've been reading my Kobo a lot recently. It's so easy to forget you're reading an electronic device, especially if your book is engrossing. Obviously I'll read paper books again but it's the easiest thing in the world to chuck a light slab of plastic in your bag that's thinner than most books.

this is the type of thing you hate

?

it's not proper is it

Always presumed that the publishing industry was toast, but this kind of article kind of confirms it: http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/top-10-pirated-ebooks-at-the-pirate-bay_b24142

I don't believe it's toast at all. If ebooks are competitively priced and easy to buy, people will buy them. Apple's gone a long way to proving that with its music and app stores.

Also, most people don't know how to use BT, much less set it up to download a working copy of the book they want. No industry is dying due to BT despite their foaming-mouth claims.

In the UK at least so many ebooks are more expensive than the paperback versions. And many ebooks available in the US aren't available in the UK - presumably because of Euro-VAT on ebooks and whatnot. Considering the publishing industry has had a decade-long heads-up on this from music and video I think they've shown incredible lack of forethought. Think when ebook torrenting begins in earnest its all over...

2. Advanced Sex: Explicit Positions for Explosive Lovemaking

guilty

In the UK at least so many ebooks are more expensive than the paperback versions. And many ebooks available in the US aren't available in the UK - presumably because of Euro-VAT on ebooks and whatnot. Considering the publishing industry has had a decade-long heads-up on this from music and video I think they've shown incredible lack of forethought. Think when ebook torrenting begins in earnest its all over...

― Stevie T, Tuesday, 1 March 2011 23:20 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yep, I agree 100%. The same crap happens here – some ridiculous recent decision to maintain ancient parallel import laws means all our books are obscenely overpriced. Last week I imported a book from the UK at almost half the local shelf price. Many of our ebooks are also overpriced and the range is crap (some publishers simply won't allow their products to be sold in this territory), so the only way to get those ebooks is via... certain means.

My post upthread refers to a desirable point in the near future. Right now it's difficult to justify spending $10 on an ebook when (a) other countries get the same book for less, (b) the paperback is less again and (c) we're actively blocked from purchasing some books, but I trust competition (including piracy) to change all that.

the send-to-kindle thing is really the best thing ever, especially if you're a writer. a geographically-distant friend and i have been exchanging fiction by just sending it to each others' kindles--the kindle owner doesn't even have to do anything; he just wakes up one morning and there's the other guy's short story.

also i read my EMP talk from my kindle. basically i haven't printed anything out since i got it.

anyone had issues with converting PDFs using the @free.kindle.com address? I assume it's automated at amazon's end?

it's automated, yeah, although i found the formatting didn't work very well (for the one thing i tried). DOCs and plaintext seem to be ideal.

broke my 2nd kindle (got up on the bed and put my hand down on the kindle and crrrrack, top half of screen is now frozen. not to worry, amazon sent one out instantly but it's currently lost in the depths of the uk post service as i wasn't in to sign for it today).

first time was a huge pain as i had to recreate all my collections again. had the books backed up on my pc so no major worry but putting 300 books back into collections was agony.

anyway i hunted about and realised that if set your pc to show system files then just copy the previously hidden 'system' folder in the root of the kindle (should be about 47mb) then it'll keep all the collection structure intact. or at least some json file in there does.

so so glad i found this as it'll save me like 2 hours of clicky slog. hope it helps some of you ilx bros out there

i tried reading the alistair campbell diaries, but it was a pdf with a weird layout - the text was kinda small and centred with a huge white margin but on the very edge of the margin theres a |_ type shape, which means the kindle can't zoom in to show just the main text, making it unreadable as the text is just too small. so i converted it to mobi using calibre but the structure is all screwed, with page numbers interupting it all the time. does anyone know of a good guide on how to fix these little annoyances?

another calibre gripe, when i try to send a downloaded newspaper mobi file to my kindle it just won't work, blames the email address but i've tried a bunch of different ones and all the same. anyone have a similar problem? it's not a major deal as i can just mail it or drag it on there manually but it'd be nice to fix it

Really considering going with the Color Nook. The ability to read PDFs and Word docs (but, sadly, not edit) would really come in handy when I need to look over drawings or specs on the road and I like the idea of Android apps.

I'm reading mostly PDFs on my K3. Most of the time zooming to 150% and making the text one step darker works perfectly. I love this thing. Have gotten thru a few ebooks/texts of varying lengths since December - something that rarely happens with my (beloved) paper books.

did amazon discontinue their £30 versh of the cover?

the light-less cover actually screws up the device (it keeps restarting at random) so they discontinued it. i just sent mine back for this reason

"i tried reading the alistair campbell diaries, but it was a pdf with a weird layout - the text was kinda small and centred with a huge white margin but on the very edge of the margin theres a |_ type shape, which means the kindle can't zoom in to show just the main text, making it unreadable as the text is just too small."

you could shop off the white space using briss: http://sourceforge.net/projects/briss/

ahhhhhh, did not know that. assume they'll reissue it at some point once they have a fix xp

just learned about this, p.cool

Okay, the Kindle's coolest feature isn't even a "Kindle feature" at all. Project Gutenberg, the huge public domain e-book repository, has created a Magic Catalog of its tens of thousands of Kindle-formatted offerings.

The Magic Catalog is a text file of all these e-books, complete with links to the Kindle version of the file. Download the Magic Catalog to your Kindle, open it like a regular book, and use the search feature to find favorite authors or titles. Then click on the URL, and the Kindle's Web browser pops open, downloads the book, and puts it atop your library on the home screen.

Forget the more tedious process of transferring material to the Kindle from your computer; this is the way to go, and the small file size of most books means that downloading anything, even over the 3G data network, is almost instantaneous.

This doesn't work well for foreign literature, since the best modern translations are still under copyright; use Project Gutenberg and you might well end up with some 18th century Alexander Pope rhyming couplet version of a classic work. But for English-language originals, this is terrific. Because it makes the material so easy to access and read, I've already plowed through huge amounts of material, from Byron's Don Juan to the Communist Manifesto to a P.G. Wodehouse novel.

If it always seemed like too much work to actually track down a copy of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Project Gutenberg makes it simple to find, and Kindle makes it simple to read.

oh awesome.

Fantastic! My Kindle comes through in a few days, this is most likely the very first thing I'll do on it.

the light-less cover actually screws up the device (it keeps restarting at random) so they discontinued it. i just sent mine back for this reason

― kl0ppa kl0ppa down (tpp), Thursday, March 10, 2011 2:21 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark

whoah for real? i haven't had any problems with this (though i haven't had time for leisure reading lately

i ~have~ noticed not-great battery life---is that because the wireless is on? i've got the 3g/wireless vers

i ~have~ noticed not-great battery life---is that because the wireless is on?

i noticed this too, and yeah turning the wireless off helps, but more importantly (though totally unhelpfully), after i'd had the thing a month or so it suddenly started lasting way way longer. like it went from two days to a week. so i dunno if you have to "break it in" (i drained it to nothing and recharged to full a few times in that first month), or if my kindle's crazy, or if i am, but that happened.

You do have to break in lithium-ion batteries. It's the same with phones etc., they need 2-3 full discharge cycles before the battery life really picks up.

huh

oh and apparently the wireless hacks off about 25% of your available battery time so yeah, if that's a problem for you turn off the wireless and see what happens.

The Magic Catalog

3G wireless on goes through standby time at about 5-7x as fast as when it is off. Without 3G, I've seen standby times of 2 months+.

Also, when you first get it, and load it up with all your books, it burns through the battery indexing all the files for search.

Just upgraded from Kindle first generation to Kindle 3. Debated about whether to spring for the 3G but I realized that one day I'd be stuck in some cabin somewhere- or I'd be at home with malfunctioning WiFi- and just have to download that one more thing that would make my reading life perfect.

Noticed that with the line spacing the way it was the amount of text on the Kindle 1st gen was about half that of the 3rd and the same as that on the iPhone app.

If your phone acts as a wi-fi hotspot you don't need a 3G Kindle, unless you'ree ultrafanatical about whispersync.

^otm

Seems like I'd have to jailbreak my phone then put some buggy software on it to do that, and I don't want to go there.

4.3 has hotspot in it (3GS or better)

Thanks. Just downloaded 4.3, but in fact Personal Hotspot only comes on iPhone 4.

Really? I've got it on this 3Gs. That's dev build tho, poss different. Swizz if so, because it works fine.

Yes, looks like it was on there for a while and then they removed it when it went production.

magic catalog has magically stopped working for me

every time I click one of the links it says kindle unable to open the page :/

magic catalog has magically stopped working for me

every time I click one of the links it says kindle unable to open the page :/

ditto :(