Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

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 :(

Think gutenberg is up and down.

Also, after one instance of navigation error to the Gutenberg pages, the error page tends to redisplay with new links clicked, *but* it still DLs the new book asked for. Well, on mine at least.

gutenberg is/was moving servers, there's a note on the homepage.

have just installed KindleForPC under wine on linux laptop. just for larks, really. but the ease of clicking gutenburg links and having them download and pop up in the reader means i already have 12 things to read.

This thing is amazing. Suddenly the Kobo feels like a neglected stepchild.

I haven't used this in ages. I think I read one book from it. Maybe I'll just give mine away.

It either suits you or it doesn't. Nothing beats it for travelling though.

i'm considering this, is there anything i should know, or alternatives anyone would rep for?

Looking at the 3g etc model, if they ship to ireland, which can be tricky for electricals with amazon sometimes

I can't rep for anything else anymore. Kindles are the shit.

Unless you really need to (a) urgently buy books on the go and (b) urgently sync your current page with Amazon on the go every time you turn a page, get the wifi. If your phone has a hotspot feature or if you have regular exposure to a wifi hotspot, get the wifi. If you don't have a wifi thingy at home and you don't know wtf I'm talking about, get the 3G.

i have a wifi thingy at home, but am likely to be moving in the near future and wifi status is uncertain going fwd.

i do however have an awesome gf (whom i plan to be taking with me) who doesn't mind getting the 3G model for me.

ta for confirmation, i was 90% certain anyway

how is the quality of free public domain books on the kindle?

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.freekindlebooks.org/MagicCatalog/magiccatalog.html <--- 456735725186782 times better

Quality is reasonable ime

I should explain that link.

1. Open the link in your Kindle's browser
2. Let it save the file as a book on yer Kindle
3. Open the book (called "Magic Catalogue something-or-other")
4. Search for a book or author
5. Click the link to that book and it will download the book to your Kindle

the display on my kindle broke several weeks ago (by "broke" i mean, 2/3 of the screen was stuck looking like a scrambled cable channel). got another one under the warranty but after a few weeks the new one's screen is broken as well. i believe i can get yet another replacement. i think the culprit is my tendency to carelessly tossing my backpack around.

have you considered not tossing your backpack around

no

eh i will probably just use it at home from now on.

oh wait my library only has EPUB files. no kindle for me.

Get Calibre.

I'm not reading a book on my computer. I tried that with comics and it was terrible.

No no no, you use Calibre to convert your epubs to mobi format (if there's no DRM).

this is on the way!

\(^_^)/

ya srsly stoked

calibre is a bit of a nightmare though right? any alternative?

(aa here) Not that I know of. Calibre's interface is an abortion but it's the best free conversion tool available.

Horrible interface, but I was shocked how good Calibre's conversion was. Saved me a lot of trouble at work, I originally planned to maintain two separate versions of our book, one Mobi and one ePub, but Calibre does a really great job converting ePubs.

Ok, I’ll take a beta blocker then try it again

you can now buy a Kindle for $114 ($25 than the previous cheapest price) but it has "sponsored screensavers" and ads that run on the bottom of the home page

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004HFS6Z0/ref=tsm_1_fb_kin_kdev_20110411

whaaaaat

save $20 and watch nonstop ads, the fuck

i actually literally do not even

well tbf they aren't "nonstop," they're on the screensaver and on the home page - not in the book itself - based on my understanding

still totally bizarre, like they're giving people small discounts to be guinea pigs

p terrible idea

Also I recently got a couple medical texts on kindle and while its awesome to have thousands of pages of reference in my pocket, neither of them have ~functional tables of content~. like wtf. That is some bullshit imo

from what I understand, you can put your own homebrew screensavers on the kindle and amazondoesn't give a crap (they won't say you violated warranty for some obscure reason)

there's freeware called Calibre that converts book files to one another

dude we were having the calibre discussion yesterday :)

gbx, there's an issue with publishers chucking their proofs into some magical machine and selling the results without so much as a glance. Also recently I downloaded samples of a few Chinese grammar books, all of which had the Chinese bits in jpg tables. What the hell am I going to do with a jpg table full of sentences ffs.

I've been downloading samples by default now, burnt by too many terrible conversions.

Oddly I find that some books on the ~~~~net are far more accurate than the official samples on Amazon. imo they have no right to cry foul until they start offering customers a quality product, especially at $10 a time.

for real. these books are almost entirely useless now (two are references that aren't necessarily meant to be read in a linear fashion, and the other is a book of practice questions grouped by subject. again, non-linear).

even more aggravating is that fixing the book ought to be something i could do myself---i know LaTeX and HTML and the like, and i can't imagine that a functional table of contents consists of much more than links to anchors or w/e

like this shit would take the publisher maybe a couple hours to fix

I suppose when ebooks hit critical mass (currently boosted by the death of Borders worldwide imo) they'll suddenly panic and pay some outsourcing company to do all the resetting, but by then customers will have seen the representative quality on offer and given up. And I've not even mentioned DRM, geographic restrictions &c.

oh man, i could soapbox about this all day

I just spent actual money on Kindle books for the first time today after finding Alfred Kubin's The Other Side and Lexicon Devil (the Darby Crash bio) were out as Kindle books. Had almost given up hope of either ever coming back in print.

but real books are cool

and don't you want that cute girl/boy across from you to see what you're reading? (assuming its not game of thrones or something)

They are, and I do, but I have to admit it's nice for out-of-print stuff.