1741

i sold my kobo and put down for a kindle 3 for when i am in seattle next week.

1742

the people over at mobileread are very enthusiastic about uploading nicely formatted versons of ebooks, even if gutenberg has them already.

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/ebooks.php?forumid=128 for mobi/prc. they got other versions as well in other forums.

1743

The Feedbooks kindle guide is nifty. It puts what’s basically a large index file chock full of links to download any of their titles.

1744

Hmm. Just finished my library hardback and starting to read on my Kindle 3 (3G + Wireless.) I have the case with the light, since this will be in my computer bag a lot for traveling.

One issue I just realized: with my “normal” books I’m not that worried if I get a drip of mustard on the book (I read a lot while eating while on the road or sometimes at home.) Here I fear I’ll ruin the thing if I get a stain on it. What’s the recommended method for cleaning if you spill something on it? Also - do you guys put some kind of scratch protector on the screen?

1745

You can get a waterproof case for it, I wouldn’t get any sort of moisture anywhere it.

Also: eww.

1746

Oh, so YOU’RE that guy!

;)

1747

just finished my first book on the kindle and enjoyed the reading experience.

then i went on to read something with foot notes. good god, i wish i could program a button to be a foot note button. i hate having to scroll to the location of the foot note with the device merrily telling me the definition of words along with way.

1748

I read a book and a half in my Hawaii trip. More impressions:

  • Yeah still liking it. Starting to see some of the weaknesses in only have a wireless model, especially on the road, especially when you’re subscribed to a few periodicals (as I am).

  • For whatever reason after the first 2 days or so the Kindle is not seeing the wireless hub in the apartment. Have no idea why, and dialing in directly doesn’t seem to work either. It sees everyone else around me except for that one. At the same time, my computer (also wireless) also sees it just fine, as does my laptop. My iPhone has a different issue where it just forgets the hub is there and I have to remind it again (and sometimes re-enter the password). Oh and it won’t even use enterprise or p2p wireless, so I can’t connect at work. I guess I have to go to Starbucks a lot.

  • Organization of docs should be a bit better than what it is currently, or at least the sorting options should be better. Collection management seems a bit obtuse as well, since it tells you to choose from everything you have (the exception is in the next sentence), including stuff already in your collection and other collections. And you can’t choose where to put periodicals, they’re stuck in the root directory.

  • Saving clippings destroys the original formatting, so you have on giant ass paragraph to sort through.

  • Reading with it is awesome, and the e-ink display still highly impresses me. It’s very easy to read, and I can’t say more highly that whole experience is. You just can’t see it at night. And occasionally, especially around image-heavy stuff, there’s some “bleed” where you can still see stuff from a previous page/screen. I had no problem going through a whole newspaper’s worth of articles and a book and a half with it over the course of a few days and about 10 hours in an airplane.

  • On PDFs, yeah the scanned image ones are just going to be crappy, but “True PDFs” work well, but are too hard to read without zooming in, meaning you have to navigate pages split up into basically four quarters.

— Alan

1749

The “bleeding” seems mainly to happen in contexts where it doesn’t do the whole blinky refresh thing, like on web pages or other such things. I figure that’s why they do the blinking thing on page refresh, to prevent that from happening with normal reading.

The way you describe PDFs is exactly as I’ve encountered it, except that I’d characterize the “zoom in to each quarter of the page” as completely useless behavior, if you think you’re going to read books in PDF format.

Collection management is definitely a weak point of the Kindle. I know that everyone fears hierarchies these days, but they really really really need a way to use hierarchies, and particularly to create them from the PC. I use Calibre to load up the Kindle, and it has enough metadata to put stuff on there in any sensible way, but it’s actually impossible for it to do so.

1750

Agreed, that is definitely the weakest feature. The Calibre software is apparently aware of collections but is unable to touch them. Technical explanation:

Kindles create a backup of their current collections content in a file called “collections.json” The problem is that manipulating this file doesn’t actually change the collections unless you turn off wireless and restart your kindle. Also, the entries in this “collections.json” file are MD5 hashes of the book filenames and sometimes some other information. So even entering data into this file may not get the results you want.

I wouldn’t look for this to be added to Calibre any time soon unless the Kindle SDK is published and they provide access to the collections. Kovid Goyal (Calibre’s lead developer) doesn’t use collections, and he isn’t highly motivated to add this feature. So, it’s only going to appear if either Amazon publishes API access information, or another Calibre contributor decides to work on it, or both. (link)

1751

There’s an app to manage collections floating around, but it was never officially released and the developer kinda disappeared. It worked fine for me. Only problem is that you do have to restart your kindle after changing them. It’ll come.

1752

Ran into another annoyance with Amazon’s online Kindle store. I’ve been reading the Shadows of the Apt fantasy series, and book 4 is only available as print, whereas books 1, 2, 3 and 5 are available as ebooks. Grr.

1753

Some publishers are refusing to make books ebooks until 6 months after release. Maybe that’s the case here?

1754

If so, why release book 5, but not book 4? Book 5, I’m guessing, would be published more recently.

1755

Other than malice or bureaucratic oversight, the only sensible reason I can think of is that for the newest book, they have a structured master file available and can convert to ebook format easily (which I assume is now standard practice for publishers); whereas with the older ones, the master file is in an awkward DTP-focused format (or maybe they don’t even have an electronic master, and have to scan/OCR/edit it), and they have an ongoing project to convert their back-catalog to ebook form, and haven’t gotten to book 4 yet.

1756

Sorry Case, that was silly of me, I just automatically saw 4,5 instead of 3,5.

1757

Interactive Fiction!

(Haven’t tried it out myself yet.)

1758

Boo, it’s not dedicated. Nice idea, but I’d rather not have the wireless on for extended periods and kill my battery.

1759

It’s Zork.

1760

That’s cute, but the idea of having to type out anything longer than a few words an hour on my DX’s keyboard makes me stabby.