TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘kindle’ Category

By Andrys Basten



The photo at the left is by “legendarypoet” and I was struck by what a beautiful b&w shot it is, of a b&w e-reader.  Click on the image to see his original, or click on screen name to see his photo page.

I spent time yesterday, by request, taking more comparison photos of font and text differences between the Kindle 3 and Kindle 2, and I’ll get some up later on.

I’ll touch instead this morning on some subjects that have come up in comment-areas here and in topics being discussed on the various Kindle forums.

FULLY CHARGE A NEW KINDLE
One thing to know as you open the Kindle package is that you can read on the Kindle while it’s charging.  Give it a full charge when it’s new — it usually takes about 2 hours, as it already has some battery life remaining.  Mine was halfway down.  The bottom LED light turns a bright, solid green when done.

Q & A

HOW WILL I MOVE KINDLE BOOKS FROM MY OTHER KINDLE TO THE NEW KINDLE 3?
Amazon’s few instructions (in an email you receive before getting your Kindle and instructions ON your Kindle) are brief but well written and cover most of what you need.  On the Kindle, the guide is named “Transferring Your Kindle Content” – and since your books and subscriptions content is in your personal area/library on Amazon’s servers, you’ll need to have the Wireless turned on in order to access those servers.

For newcomers: With the Kindle, that’s done by pressing the Menu button and selecting the topmost choice, “Turn Wireless On” — and of course that slot toggles the choice, to turn it “Off” — to conserve battery power.

You can purchase books from Amazon with your computer while waiting for your new Kindle, as Amazon pre-registers your Kindle and gives it identifying info you can modify later under Menu/Settings).  All books you’ve bought earlier will already be in your Library, and new ones will be added to it and also sent to the Kindle you designate as the receiving Kindle.

For more information, see Amazon’s help pages for getting files to your Kindle – “Transferring, Downloading, and Sending Files to Kindle.”

(more…)

By Gary Price Founder and Senior Editor of Resource Shelf



by Judith Jordet, MLS

From the Article:

If each inmate could have a library of over 1,000 titles in one small e-book reader, it would cut down on hiding contraband among the books (such as sandpaper to erase their uniform logo), remove the unsanitary habit of reading books in the rest-room, cut down on repairing books (averaging 20% or over 1,200 books destroyed each year), free up space by limiting the 3 X 8 foot long bookshelves that only hold 640 books for 100 inmates in each unit, encourage struggling readers to listen to a book while reading the text on the screen, and, finally, allow anyone to increase the size of the font so LARGE PRINT will never be limited to a few titles!

However, my research revealed problems that only a niche market can solve. I studied the Kindle, Sony and Nook e-book readers; all of them are equipped to access the Internet. I wish an e-book reader existed that only accessed the millions of legitimately published books (rather than anonymous individuals self-publishing on the Internet, not accountable to anyone even for spelling or grammar). Imagine an e-book reader that specialized in accessing books by title, author, subject, date, publisher, language, format (audio, digital) and/or keyword!

Much More in the Complete Article

Source: Corrections.com

Via Resource Shelf and Frank Sleightholme

By Paul Biba

From the Nashua Telegraph comes an article on innovative ways for state governments to provide services:

A woman was spending four hours a day helping her husband to read books, because Parkinson’s disease had deprived him of the ability to turn the pages on his own.

The state determined that hiring someone to do that two hours a week for a whole year would cost about $2,300, based on the standard companion rate for that region of the state. Doing it five days a week would have cost more than $11,500 a year.

Instead, they agreed to purchase a Kindle at a one-time cost of $495.

“For less than $500, the family caregiver was afforded more respite than she could have wished for and her husband won some of his independence back,” the state wrote.

Thanks to Frank Sleightholme for the link.

By Paul Biba

From the Staples press release:

[Staples] announced today plans to offer customers Kindle, Amazon’s #1 best-selling, most-wished-for and most-gifted product for two years running. Staples is the only office superstore to carry the wireless reading device in all of its stores nationwide beginning this fall. …

Staples will also carry a full assortment of Kindle accessories. Kindle is part of several new exciting technology products available from Staples in time for the 2010 holiday season. Staples will announce their full line-up of top tech products and other great savings for the season later this fall.

By Chris Meadows

A comment on a recent post comparing Kindle 2 and Kindle 3 screens noted that the near-black background of the graphite version caused the background on the Kindle 3’s screen to seem brighter, though it was actually exactly the same.

However, it turns out that the Kindle 3 is also available in a white model, and Andrys Basten at A Kindle World has posted a head-to-head comparison photo of both devices showing a screensaver, as well as pictures of the Kindle 3 by itself displaying the New York Times. These photos make it a lot easier to judge the Kindle 3 against the Kindle 2 without the different case colors complicating things.

It is clear from the photo that the Kindle 3 has significantly better contrast than the 2, though I kind of wish Andrys had posted some more comparisons, depicting how text looked on both screens next to each other.

I found the comparison via a post by Tim Carmody at Wired’s Gadget Lab blog. Carmody also talks about a few of the interesting tips he worked out from the photos of the Times, and some of the annoying things the Kindle’s web browser can’t do.

By Paul Biba

iReader Review has an article on the Kindle 3 and Manga. They have lots of screen shots and also go into great detail about how to get Mangle up and running on the K3.

The Kindle 3 handles images really well – But can Kindle 3 handle Manga?

K and 4rc wanted to find out about Kindle 3′s Manga capabilities and also how well Mangle, the Manga Program for Kindle, works with Kindle 3. Well, this post has some photos to show you that Kindle 3 does fine – The Kindle 3 Manga photos are after the jump (second part of the post). …

Overall, Mangle lets you view Manga as Manga books on your Kindle 3 easily and well. It’s just like reading a book since your place in the Manga and your settings are preserved. The ability to zoom in a lot means you can read the text even if it’s too small and you can also zoom into individual frames.

By Paul Biba

From Manybooks addministrator:

A kind visitor pointed out that many (if not most) of the Kindle/Mobipocket links were missing from the mobile version of the site: mnybks.net

Happily, that issue has been resolved. Unfortunately, I don’t have a Kindle to test with, let alone the latests model, the Kindle 3 — would anyone care to try a download or two directly to the Kindle 3 via it’s built-in web browser, and let me know how it works?

By Chris Meadows

A New York Examiner blog post looks at the continuing order backlog on the Kindle 3, quoting a post from Amazon’s Kindle Community Forum in regard to shipping schedules:

• Orders placed before 8 p.m. Pacific Time on August 1st will still ship by the August 27th release date.
• Orders placed before 10 p.m. Pacific Time on August 5th will ship on or before September 4th.
• Orders placed before 12 p.m. Pacific Time on August 12th will ship on or before September 8th.
• Orders placed after 12 p.m. Pacific Time on August 12th will ship on or before September 12th.

The bottleneck in this case, the post states, is PVI, the company making the Pearl e-ink screens. It is not able to keep up with current demand, especially given that other e-reader companies are ordering Pearl screens as well. Given that it is unlikely PVI is going to be able to ramp up production for the Christmas season, there may very well be a dearth of Kindle 3s under the tree save for those that were ordered early.

But on the other side of things, 9 to 5 Mac notes that the shipping date on the iPad has, over the last few weeks, dwindled from 7-10 business days to “within 24 hours” as of August 27th. Is this because Apple has ramped up production to meet demand? Or has demand simply fallen off, especially as consumers have been more impressed by the higher-resolution iPhone 4?

Of course, I know that the two products are aimed at different demographics, and someone who wants one wouldn’t necessarily want to settle for the other instead. But all the same, it’s interesting to note that anyone who might be frustrated with the long shipping wait for the Kindle 3 can now get an iPad faster than ever.

By Paul Biba

This is a brilliant essay in the Guardian and I think all hardware reviewers should take note of it. Naughton discusses how people are making an “… an elementary schoolboy mistake, namely the assumption that, in a networked world, it is the hardware that matters most. According to this view, because the iPad, viewed purely as a device, was seen as incomparably superior to the Kindle, it followed that Apple would triumph in the ebooks market.”

He then goes on to say:

In the end, however, it’s not hardware that matters, but the effectiveness of the overall system in which the device is embedded. That was the great lesson of the Apple iPod: although the hardware was lovely from the outset, it would never have had the impact it had without the link to iTunes software on the PC/Mac and thence to the iTunes store. Other companies had made nice MP3 players, but none had put together a seamless system for getting music from CDs or online retailers on to them. Apple did and the rest is history.

You really should read the whole thing. In this regard, I don’t generally toot my own horn, but here are a couple of excerpts from an article I wrote in August of 2008 about Sony and Amazon. It’s entitled Amazon is right – Sony is wrong – Digital Editions sucks:

I like things simple as well. This hit me like a fish in the face when I installed Fictionwise’s eReader on my iPhone. Want a book – go to Fictionwise on the phone and download one. It hit me again, more like a whale in the face, when a I told a colleague about a free ebook being offered by Amazon. He has a Kindle and, while I watched he fired it up and downloaded the book while standing outside in the sunshine. No computer, no USB cable, no card reader, no Sony software, no Adobe software, no Calibre software, no conversion programs, no WiFi router. He bought a book without a computer – while standing outside in the sunshine. Get it?

He did something remarkable. He wanted a book and he bought it (albeit for free). What’s that like? It’s like going to a bookstore. Wow! NOW we are having fun.

As much as I dislike DRM and all the associated crap, what I have a profound respect for is that extremely difficult thing to attain – a painless consumer experience. Apple has achieved this with iTunes and Amazon is achieving it with the Kindle.

People are always commenting to me on my Sony Reader. I am now working directly in the consumer space and I’m amazed at how many people are attracted to the machine and would like one for themselves. When they ask me what they should do – the answer is clear: get a Kindle. The consumer wants, and rightfully so, things to be simple, easy and not to require technical expertise. The Kindle encompasses all of this. One stop shopping. Hey, buying an ebook is just the same as buying a box of cereal. The fact that you may not be able to finish the cereal because someone padlocks the box is another question. That’s the question we focus too often on here. Let’s get the cereal into the kitchen first.

Thanks to Frank Sleightholme for the link

By Paul Biba

Here are a couple more reviews that are worth your time. I’ve selected excerpts that deal with the browser.

The first is from The EBook Reader. Among other things the reviewer says:

I opted for the WiFi only model because I couldn’t foresee needing to use the 3G all that often—but now I’m regretting that choice because the new WebKit browser actually works better than I’d expected, at least with WiFi. It’s not blazing fast and is somewhat limited but is useful for checking email, getting news updates, downloading free ebooks from Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg, Baen, etc., and the article mode is a cool feature.

The second is from Dear Author:

The Kindle 3 sports a webkit browser which is supposed to do a better job of rendering pages. Don’t go to Dear Author because it crashed my Kindle 3 each time I attempted to load it. I had better results with sites like Twitter or Google or even Gmail because of the lack of images. I powered up IbisReader because IbisReader allows you to upload DRM free ePubs and read them on the web.

The IbisReader actually looked fairly decent although the letters were crisper and looked more like a native book in the Article Mode. The problem was in Article Mode, you couldn’t access any links. In order to move to the next chapter, you would have to switch to Web Mode. …

Click on the thumbnails for larger images. [Not included in this excerpt.] The first one is article mode and the second is web mode. The benefit to this is that you can read your epubs (DRM free) via the Kindle but only by using IbisReader. Otherwise, you’ll need to convert your epubs to mobi. This does give you some insight on how you will be able to access the Google Editions cloud from a Kindle device as well. Problematically, is that currently there is no caching of content so you would a) always need access to the internet and b) have to reload a book each time you visited the web. Not ideal.

And some really techie info from iReaderReview:

Go to Settings page and type in 311 or 711 or one of the other numbers listed below -

311– providers
411– one page of info
611– now 6 pages of info on everything 3G communication
711– wi-fi

By Paul Biba

The unofficial Amazon Kindle Blog has a review of the Kindle 3 and as part of it the author measured the contrast of the Kindle 3, Kindle 2, Nook and Sony PRS-600. Go over to the blog to find out how he did this.

Here are his results:

He also has some measurements of the current draw of the new Amazon booklight/case and so can predict its Kindle battery life impact.

By Paul Biba

Me and My Kindle has a great post today about this important topic.

She’s reading an ebook on her Kindle, and then the camera pans back to reveal she’s reading it at the beach. (“Silver moons and paper chains,” the background music sings. “Faded maps and shiny things…)” The camera pulls back before you can read the whole page, as though Amazon’s trying to tease you. But one day, I decided I finally had to find out: exactly what ebook is that?

If you want to find out what the book is, then go over and take a look. David Cassel has gone even farther and found the song in the ad and the singers thereof.

The photo is a screenshot from the ad.

By Chris Meadows

A couple of days ago, David Pogue had a look at the Kindle 3, positively comparing it to the iPad: it might do less, but it costs a lot less—a great bargain for people who just want to read e-books. Though he doesn’t pull any punches about the prices of e-books themselves, mostly up to $13 from the $10 they used to be.

Those prices seem high. The fact that e-books involve no printing, binding, shipping, distributing or taking back and shredding unsold copies ought to save you something. And it’s outrageous that you can’t sell or even give away an e-book when you’re finished with it. You paid for it; why shouldn’t you be allowed to pass it on? (End of rant.)

Pogue notes that the Kindle’s real competition is actually not the iPad, but rather all the other e-ink readers that have been coming out lately. Even compared to these, it is still doing well. Pogue writes that “the new Kindle offers the best E Ink screen, the fastest page turns, the smallest, lightest, thinnest body and the lowest price tag of any e-reader. It’s also the most refined and comfortable.”

Related: NYT’s David Pogue: Kindle 2 better choice than Sony Reader PRS-700

By Paul Biba

I got a kick at looking at the gradual decline in the quality of the Kindle packaging from versions 1 to 3. It makes sense, of course, as everything contributes to the final selling price.

But, the Kindle 1 certainly had a beautiful box – worthy of being on a bookshelf:

Kindle 1

Kindle 2

Kindle 3

By Paul Biba

The pictures speak for themselves.

Kindle 1

Kindle 2

Kindle 3

By Chris Meadows

I didn’t notice this David Pogue article from August 12th until Techdirt and Slashdot pointed it out just the other day. Though most of the article is about other cool features offered by iOS 4 (unified contacts, Facetime tricks), in the last section Pogue talks about the VoiceOver “spoken books” feature on the iPad and wonders why the Authors Guild and publishers hasn’t freaked out about it. I previously looked at the matter back in March; you’d think they would have had time to speak up by now.

Yes, this is exactly the feature that debuted in the Amazon Kindle and was then removed when publishers screamed bloody murder. But somehow, so far, Apple has gotten away with it, maybe because nobody’s even realized this feature is in there.

Why is it all right for the iPad to read books aloud, but not the Kindle? Because it’s more obviously part of an overall accessibility system for the blind, whereas the Kindle’s was meant for the convenience of the sighted (and indeed, the rest of it proved to be so inaccessible to the blind that colleges were prohibited from adopting it for textbooks), perhaps? Or is the Authors Guild more willing to give Apple a pass since it helped them stand up to the “man” on the matter of e-book pricing?

Since Pogue explained how to do it, I went ahead and gave it a try myself. It read a little fast to be understandable on the default setting, though that is adjustable by slider. The odd emphases and pauses also didn’t help understandability, and I didn’t really like the way it changed the device’s default gestures. It’s not going to replace a talented audiobook actor any time soon.

Still, I did like how loud and fairly easy to understand the individual words were, and it’s good to have the capability available even if it’s not one I would ordinarily choose to use.