Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

I've got a sony reader but this is the default ereader thread so

There's a program called Calibre that will strip DRM and convert formats for any e-reader.

Kindle fire owners- yes or no?

Calibre is awesome, but pretty sure it doesn't strip DRM. In fact, I want to say the Calibre site even has an awesome anti-DRM screed, but says it's up to you to do the deed.

Ebooks can be converted from a number of formats into whatever format your ebook reader prefers. Many ebooks available for purchase will be protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. calibre will not convert these ebooks. It is easy to remove the DRM from many formats, but as this may be illegal, you will have to find tools to liberate your books yourself and then use calibre to convert them.

There's an easy to find plug in for Calibre that strips drm. Works like a charm.

Yeah, I have definitely used it to strip DRM.

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/

Have only recently discovered this place. Not earning atm, so this site is manna from heaven. Finally found a reasonable English copy of The Dice Man. I'm yet to find a more comprehensive database on the net. I only wish I'd known about this site during my degree, could've saved me pots of money.

I'm reluct to click while at my workplace, but is this something along the lines of library.nu? (I hope)?

Never used library.nu so I can't comment there really. But this is a Russian site (in English, primarily) where you download the books direct from the site. It's not infallible but it's found most of the things I've thrown at it, including a number of fairly obscure history books.

Not had any nasty warnings about malware or anything and my early virus scans haven't shown anything either, as yet. Seems alreet.

So apparently you can't buy someone an Amazon Kindle ebook as a gift in the UK, even though you can in the US. Is this right? Too bad if so.

Generally I would still rather give a paper book than an ebook as a gift as I'd feel a bit cheap about giving "virtual" presents, but I was going to buy a book which isn't available in large print for my Gran, whose eyesight isn't what it was but who apparently loves the Kindle she got for Christmas.

Just tut-tutting into the void really.

i think i'm gonna get one. i made fun of them for a long time but i changed my mind. i was thinking about ipad mini but i think i'd be too distracted by the internet like i am by iphone.

I use Amazon vouchers for the exact amount of the book, and put in the notes what it's for.

They could go out and buy anything with it, but people just buy the book.

unless they're dicks, then you shouldn't be buying them presents anyway.....

Thanks Hamildan. I probably will do that, but letting them see the price and making them go and click "buy" etc somehow seems less present-y, and also my Gran is pretty tech-savvy for someone in her late 80s but I'm still worried she'll be confused. "The button says 'buy', but I thought you'd already bought it for me, so I don't want that, do I?" etc.

really just shrugging my shoulders and going "Americans have this, why can't we?" but there is probably some tedious reason involving publishers' legal smallprint or something

Fyi we have to go through .com for ireland too, dollars and US selection and everything.

so do we, although at least amazon shows me au$ (and geoblocks half its stuff because morons)

it's funny b/c Amazon has employees in DUB and SYD but doesn't sell things there, apart from Web Services.

'DUB and SYD' sounds like a triphop duo

Best amazon employee quote I read today was that as long as people think they're a bookstore, they're winning on everything else

same people think things like VMware are screwed in the presence of cloud hosting

Anyone published for Kindle? There are some slightly out-of-the-way public domain things that I wanted to put on my kindle-for-ipad thing, & I thought about grabbing texts from archive.org & cleaning them up. & then I thought that if I'm doing that, maybe I should publish them. Amazon have their annotated, illustrated or translated policy for public domain stuff, so maybe it would end up being too much of a pita. But then fuck it, why not produce dirt cheap annotated editions of stuff as a hobby?

I can't speak to the public domain aspect, but I helped my mom Kindle-publish a romance novella she wrote, and the process of formatting and uploading is dead easy. It took about 48 hours from submission to it being live on the site.

yr mom wrote 50 Shades?

i wish! then she could buy me health insurance with all that sweet buttplug money.

the process of formatting and uploading is dead easy

I've got a book that I'd like to toss up onto Kindle someday, if it isn't too hard. Is the formatting automated, or is there a spec sheet that you follow while hand-editing in the correct formatting codes?

I'm sure reddening can answer properly, but it looks pretty easy to me - you just have to get it to something resembling html (via Word export or whatever - I'm planning to use markdown + a script), then run that through a bit of Amazon software that'll turn it into a kindle file (.mobi).

by 'resembling html' I mean a limited subset of html

like it's basic 'h1, h2, p, b, i' markup.

I guess I could play around with formatting a sample chapter before diving in to the whole book. Then view it on Kindle for PC, tweaking anything that didn't come across ok.

Yeah, if you have a normally formatted Word document, they'll ask you to save it as a particular file type, and it'll preserve your italics/bolding/hard page breaks. I didn't create a Table of Contents, so I can't speak to the difficulty of that, but it looked no more difficult than doing basic HTML.

they also have a downloadable viewer so you can see what your book will look like on various types of Kindles/screen sizes. I ended up using that on my final editing pass to make sure it all came out okay

there's also a previewer on the tools page, which could help with the test-and-tweak process.

(xp!)

(not the kindle but i've been fiddling with epubs lately and those are pretty much just zipped up html files, complete with css support and a few files containing metadata for the chapters and toc. gutenberg seems to use a plain as day .txt file as the master source, runs a script over it to get the html and then epubs that html)

cool info

btw my last post re ordering through US now appears defunct as i bought a kindle from amazon.co.uk this week without troubles. went for the basic model, i've seen the paperwhite and the evenness of the light was not great imo, aside from that there's nothing made me feel like paying extra.

UK folks: nooks are £29 at the mo. That seems insanely cheap..

Yeah, I saw that ... are they any good?

They got decent reviews in the US. Not sure whether the content is up to scratch given lack of B&N here, but I think I'm going to take the plunge. Will report back!

godspeed

I have had a nook simple touch for about 18 months and am very happy with it.

curiosity just got the better of me and i've just ordered one (from official nook site, didn't have to register, and could specify separate shipping and billing addresses - handy as my bank uses parents' address). am happy with my kobo mini and this looks v similar, but £15 cheaper.

(spoke too soon, payment rejected)

That exact same thing happened to me last night! I got an email saying the card issuer wouldn't accept the transaction. I'd put the order through without registering and the email said if you wanted to check on your order you had to log in (which obviously I couldn't do). I tried to do the online chat thing to sort it out this morning, but after entering my details it went to a 404 error. Starting to see why they've knocked the price off.

Anyway, gave up on that and ordered through John Lewis (b/c 2year warranty) instead. Picking it up from local waitrose tomorrow.

hey so I bought one of these the other day. I have two questions:

1) is it possible to tweak the metadata in Calibre so that my Kindle will display an author's work or a series in chronological order, or am I going to have to brutally stick years/months into the head of the title of every novel?

2) can the Send To Kindle plugin for Firefox be set up to send articles to other ppl's kindles or only your own?

it said i could use Visa but only have Visa Debit card, so maybe that was the problem. also, the Verified By Visa thing didn't pop up so maybe it was that. the link in the error email didn't work (not registered...) and the support email address (b&n) bounced.

tried argos, they had nothing in stock locally but would let me order one for pickup locally in 5 days time. the 1 ended up as 2, somehow and then i got an 'out of stock' email.

will try john lewis, or might just pop to blackwells (or john lewis i guess), see if they have any there.

as for charli's questions, i doubt the first one is possible unless kindle has a sort-by-artist-then-date option. i had the same problem with a 13 volume set and ended up putting the volume number in the title, clumsy as that was (but less clumsy than adding the date).

the second one might use the email to kindle interface in which case it might be possible to specify another email address. letting people send random things to random kindles sounds like a disaster waiting to happen though.

"You will be prompted to register with your Amazon.com account after installation is complete by entering your Amazon.com account e-mail address and password." oh, i guess not then, unless you know those details.

just ordered one from blackwells via paypal. will see if it arrives.

then, checked email to find a message from NOOK

"Dear Valued Customer,

We are writing to you about your recent nook.co.uk order.

Recently you may have received an email from us stating that we had some difficulty
charging your credit card. We are pleased to tell you that the problem has been
resolved. We experienced some system issues due to the widespread interest in our
limited time offer on NOOK Simple Touch. We hope that you will return to nook.co.uk
to place your order again.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused."

ah, ok, reading that seems to suggest that the original order didn't go through. thought i'd end up with two then (which wouldn't be the end of the world but...)

Haha I got the same email. I think you're right - eiher related to visa debit or lack of online password thingumy.

This statement in wikipedia has been enough to make me hesitate over getting a Nook Simple Touch:

it has 2 GB of internal memory of which only half is available for content. Of the 1 GB of content, 750 MB is reserved for content from Barnes & Noble's e-book store, which leaves approximately 250 MB for other files

I know why they do this, but I hate them for it already.

I have 70 books on it. I can manage to find something to read whatever my mood. And there's an SD slot if for some reason I wanted it to be my library. That division of memory is entirely irrelevant in practical use.

yeah you need a micro SD card. Then you're golden.

So, it doesn't enforce this 3:1 split on your micro SD? That's good to know. I suppose I could swap books into the internal memory, too. I expect I'll take the ebook reader plunge this year, then.