Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

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.

"sponsored screensavers"

lol PUSH.

I used Opera when the free version came with ads. I just pinned winamp over them.

Re: those table of contents, it can be a tedious pain in the ass to encode those TOCs - it's ridiculous that so many publishers aren't doing it properly

gbx you actually can totally do it yourself! I do 90% of the work in text editors. But you have to ask yourself if it's worth the hours of time you'll spend learning to write .NCX files and compiling .mobis with Kindlegen. Though in short, as you guessed you put in the anchors in HTML and then edit the .NCX file (just a strict XHTML doctype) and that's it, followed by compile.

"I am compiling my latest novel"

lol

The more I hear people bang on about kindles, the more I think I fucked up by getting a sony reader, even tho I do love it and think it's awesome. The lack of wifi fills me with jealousy. And it suffers even worse than the kindle in the makes-you-look-a-twat stakes.

Don't get a Kindle unless the Sony is actively pissing you off. Everything I've ever heard about the Sonys is positive.

they're nice but I really appreciate how light the kindle is

The touchscreen on the sony is just responsive enough - you need to press down reasonably hard to swipe the page over, which makes it feel a lot more tactile than it might do otherwise. And I appreciate the built in dictionary and the little stylus. It just seems like a secondary cousin to the kindle, but yeh, I'm not gonna trade in, it does the job it needs to do quite well I guess.

I wonder if there will ever be the equivalent to the hardcover/paperback edtions of e-books in terms of pricing? Something like $15 for new books, then a year or so after it's released, the price comes down to around 7-8 dollars. I don't own an e-reader so maybe this already happens, but after spending an hour or so perusing Amazon's e-book selection, it seemed that most of the books I would buy cost between 10-15 dollars (even books that are 7-8 dollars, new, for the paperback!). It's seems crazy for me to spend 140 dollars on a device so that I can turn around and spend more money on books, especially if the books are DRM-coded.

I mean, I don't travel that much, and when I do, bringing 2-3 paperback books and a magazine or two is more than enough for me to read on airplane trips. Maybe if my job required heavy traveling I'd find these devices more enticing.

I thought both those things before I had one - I don't travel much or have a commute, and spending money for the opportunity to spend money wasn't appealing - but when I unexpectedly got a Kindle for Christmas, I'd downloaded well over $140 worth of public domain books by the end of the day.

I haven't decided if I think it's worth its current price - that was the nice thing about getting it as a gift, I didn't have to worry about that - and Kindle ebooks are going to have to come down in price relative to "real" books. I mean, one reason I hadn't bought a Kindle already is because when I checked the books then on my wishlist, not only were few of them available, a large number of the ones that were were priced higher for the Kindle than in paperback. The paperless version should always be cheapest. I can't give it to friends when I'm done, I can't sell it to Powells (no one local buys used books anymore), it's harder to flip through it if it's something I'm using for work - whatever the behind the curtain reasons affecting the price, I'm still paying a couple bucks more for something I'm getting less out of.

Not to mention the percentage of unsold SKUs that just doesn't exist with ebooks. Publishers have treated ebooks as an excuse to charge more for books. They seem to think it's worth fucking with while the format's in its infancy. What they don't realise (impossibly) is that people are so disgusted they're either withholding purchases altogether or just straight-up nicking them off the internet. And then there's people like us here in a non-elite country who are not allowed to buy some books because the publisher has arbitrarily said no, despite us waving money at them.

Travel. If you're in the US you probably have a 32 kg baggage limit, even on international flights. When we fly internationally we're restricted to 20 kg (unless we're going to the US). The difference is a lot of books. My Kobo saved my sanity last year.

...what I meant to say is that publishers don't realise people are increasingly learning how to get ebooks off the darknet due to the high prices, just like they did with music, movies etc.

If publishers provided ebook tokens with hardbacks like movies do w/blu ray I'd buy way more of them, for certain.

The travel thing cannot be underestimated imo. Not just from the intl travel aspect, but from the commuter aspect as well.

I think a kindle wouldve been rad as an undergrad English major.

Re: those table of contents, it can be a tedious pain in the ass to encode those TOCs - it's ridiculous that so many publishers aren't doing it properly

gbx you actually can totally do it yourself! I do 90% of the work in text editors. But you have to ask yourself if it's worth the hours of time you'll spend learning to write .NCX files and compiling .mobis with Kindlegen. Though in short, as you guessed you put in the anchors in HTML and then edit the .NCX file (just a strict XHTML doctype) and that's it, followed by compile.

Tell me more...

this thing is in my hand iirc

I think a kindle wouldve been rad as an undergrad English major.

I can't decide. I mean, I can't decide if it would've been good for me as an English major, anyway ... everyone reads differently. Reading for work (I write a lot of encyclopedia entries, textbooks, things like that) is a lot like reading for college, and I'm finding I'm not crazy about the Kindle for work-related reading - I end up reserving it for things I need to read but won't need to cite or take notes from. General background reading. When I need to really use a book, I need to be able to shove three fingers in there, keep my spot at different parts of the book, flip back and forth, keep one book open while I grab another one so I can compare what Smith and Jones said about Johnson, fill it with bookmarks - even being able to tell at a glance how many pages I've bookmarked in a stack of books is something I depend on.

right

so i have the 3g model, downloading from the magic catalog above should be free right?

i'm nervous about incurring some crazy charges before i know what i'm doing here.

all free iirc

sweet.

Aside from actual non-free book purchases, is there anything else i'm likely to be charged for then?

First impressions are great

If you use send-to-kindle and don't use your @free.kindle.com address, you will be charged ($0.10/MB, I think) for documents that you send to your device.

not anything i'm likely to do by accident so. Cheers.

Yeah, should be fine. There was a built-in surcharge for buying books in some countries but I think that's gone now.

I end up reserving it for things I need to read but won't need to cite or take notes from. General background reading. When I need to really use a book, I need to be able to shove three fingers in there, keep my spot at different parts of the book, flip back and forth, keep one book open while I grab another one so I can compare what Smith and Jones said about Johnson, fill it with bookmarks - even being able to tell at a glance how many pages I've bookmarked in a stack of books is something I depend on.

interesting, i'm the opposite, i totally use it for books to take notes from, especially on the iPad. Can leave bookmarks with a tap, see them all at a glace on the bottom bar, search and best of all is not having to type the quotes, you just highlight and they sync.

Before I got a Kindle I was all "why would people want to annotate/mark text with an ebook reader", but since I got the thing I've been doing it almost daily.

Re the ipad (I know this is off topic): I've been toying with a few note-taking apps, and being able to annotate/draw on a PDF is a revelation.

I used to fold the bottom corner of pages I wanted to make notes from, and then never do it due to idleness. no more!

I don't use an iPad, though, I use the Kindle (and I tend to use it in landscape orientation, so the keyboard's not as handy - that's a minor point though, because if I used the keyboard more, I'd reorient the display). I don't know, everyone reads/note-takes differently - I'm used to making multiple passes through books, skimming quickly the first time to see which parts I need to read, folding down or otherwise marking pages, etc etc. Some of it is stuff I could re-learn, although the "compare two or more books at once" business is clumsy with anything but actual books.

I'm also okay with it not replacing books for me. mp3s didn't replace CDs for me. It's not a perfect analogy - I can create mp3s from CDs and vice versa, so they don't have to compete for my money - but still.

Yeah, I think some people are a bit weird about ebooks being a lifetime commitment, like from that moment forth you can't just pick up a book and read it.

This is cool:

http://kindleworld.blogspot.com/2011/04/11-000-local-libraries-in-kindle.html

yeah this is a big deal, overdrive compatibility had been one of the selling points for the other e-readers but not anymore

Hi. Can anyone recommend an epub->mobi converter that isn't Calibre? Thanks.

(Accidentally asked this on rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread, oops)

Sadly no. I've looked and I don't think there is one.

i found an online converter, rather than one you can d/l and use, but it worked perfectly, i'll try to find and post the address tomorrow

after a year of whining about being jealous of my wife's kindle, she and my parents got me one for my bday. pumped.

anyone have thoughts on cases? any of you using a non-amazon case?

i got a non amazon soft leather/plether folding case for about ten quid, no light but perfect besides

the amazon one is so expensive for what it is

You reckon? It's leather and it's got a light in it. It could be cheaper but it feels very well made.

I bought one with mine and can't live without that light