1641

You can get the Kindle 3 shipped to AUS from the Amazon.com page.

1642

They need to add WPA2 Enterprise support, surely that is on their to-do list?

1643

So this sucks. I’m about 25% of the way through reading my first book on the Kindle, and… I find that I prefer it to regular books. I bought the Kindle intending for it to be like a portable MP3 player, something that I use when I’m traveling, but not otherwise. But now it’s clear to me that paper really is obsolete (for prose fiction), and that I need to start moving to a digital world.

Which is really awkward because I have 2500+ paperbooks, and two decades of habit with buying and storing and reading them, and I always had sort of the expectation that books were “permanent” (unlike videogames or CDs or software or other tech-based things), and whoops.

Well, I guess it’s a good thing that I never did get those built-in bookshelves I’ve always craved.

1644

Yeah I was a full convert pretty quickly. It’s to the point that going back and reading a paper book is somewhat weird now. All these super positive K3 impressions are really making me want to upgrade my K2 too.

1645

Got my K3 the other day, and wow is this thing small and light. I don’t even want to put a case on it, especially considering the nice feel of the backing. Think I’ll get a Crown Royal bag or some such to put it in when I’m not reading on it.

My only problem so far is that I’m so used to using the iPad lately that I keep jabbing at the screen wondering why the menu won’t register my presses. Other than that, this is a huge step up from my K1, and as soon as my wife tried it she was ready to put her K2 up for auction. What a great little gadget, and priced sensibly, too.

1646

Yeah, I converted our entire bedroom to library and dreamed about the next house (10 years down the road) with a dedicated library and fewer paperbacks… perhaps with that ladder thingy on wheels.
But for actual reading, which is still my primary reason for buying books, I prefer the Kindle. So that plan has pretty much died.

Of course, how can I build this, without my books?

1647

All you really need is lone pedestal with a glass case and the Kindle sitting on a plush pillow on top.

1648

That’s been the first response of almost all my coworkers when I show them my K3. Everybody starts jabbing the screen and then they get a puzzled look on their face and ask me how to use the thing.

1649

For my own personal reading I’m Kindle all the way, but I still see a place for physical books for the time being. I like to lend out books and such I really like, and I can’t do that with Kindle books, at least without stripping the DRM and making sure the other person has a reader.

1650

I just read a Terry Pratchett book with lots of footnotes. They were kind of a pain in the ass on the Kindle. Not a huge deal, but annoying.

1651

all this talk is making me consider buying the new DX and selling my old one. Anyone know if there’s a hidden downside to selling/changing Kindles? I assume everything transfers over cleanly and that the old one can be reset?

Looking on eBay it looks like an older DX goes for $175+ depending on condition, which seems reasonable. I’m seeing the new ones on there however for $330+ shipping, some of them from what look like resellers – is that possible? A brand new one from Amazon is $379 I think so I’m not sure how these other sellers are getting new ones and selling them cheaper, which makes me a little skittish.

1652

How do they work?

1653

Was that the Kindle’s fault, or the publisher’s, stusser?

1654

Well you see a superscript number in the text as normal, then you have to use the cursor keys to select it to read the footnote. Not a massive inconvenience, but certainly an inferior experience when compared to a paper book.

This sort of thing will be a moot point in a year or two when all the ereaders have touchscreens.

1655

What happens when you click the footnote? Does it take you off to some end-of-book location that has a big list of endnotes, and then there’s a “back” link on it? I’ve been sort of curious about this.

(It seems like in principle, if the markup supported it – i.e., with a footnote tag instead of a superscript/link combo – it’d be possible for the reader to layout the thing such that the footnote would be actually shown on the bottom of the page, which’d obviously be better.)

1656

Except that ebooks don’t have fixed pages (well except pdf, but it has all sorts of issues wrt fixed pages.)

1657

Ideally tapping the superscript would bring up the footnote as an overlay that could then be closed when you’re finished reading it.

1658

That’s basically what happens. The footnote pops up when you select the little number, you read it, then hit the back button to continue where you left off. Like I said, not a massive inconvenience, but you do need to navigate your way through the page with little cursor keys, which isn’t ideal.

1659

In most books that I’ve read with footnotes that’s how it works.

For me, those have been books in which the physical edition has end-notes anyway, so the kindle edition is way superior – once I’m flipping back and forth anyway, at least I don’t have to keep a bookmark in the end-notes to tell me where to flip to.

1660

Right. Which means when you hit a footnote, you calculate how many lines you need at the bottom of the page for it, reserve that space, keep rendering the rest of the text until you reach that cutoff, and then render the footnote.

There are obviously problematic edge cases (footnote text longer than a page, footnote references near the bottom of the page such that the footnote reference and footnote itself can’t both fit on the page, etc.), but those aren’t insuperable obstacles, either.

Or at least, so I assume, not really knowing how the markup works on Mobi/ePub books. For all I know, they have no footnote markup, and the reader therefore can’t do anything special with them.