Can't highlight and other burning issues

I'm really getting tired of the fact that I can't highlight things in my newspaper subscription is really annoying. I want to be able to mark up the newspaper so I can tell people about cool news stories and I can't. It's back to paper and pen and that's not why I got a Kindle. What's worse: this is just the Kindle Fire. If I want to carry 2 Kindles, my older DX will do it just fine.

Add to this that they removed the ability to create collections of books. I really want a way to organize my book collection. Let's see you try and sort through 200+ books by title or author alone and quickly find what you want.

And the carousel at the top is impossible for me to use reliably. It goes too fast, or too slow and the item I want is always almost what I click on.

And page turning - on web pages and the web-like tools, I scroll up and down. In books I turn pages (left to right). How about giving me a preference so I can turn pages in books by scrolling up and down or page turns.

Wow! It's been a while

It's been a while since I posted anything here. Not much changed, I have been reading on my DX for a couple years now. I use a program on the mac to make Kindle books out of my documents and I buy lots of books from Amazon.

Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) is a free program for creating kindle, iPad (epub) documents and lots of different formats. I've gotten pretty good at creating tables of content and having linked content in my "books". I scanned lots of little books I like to keep for reference and ran OCR on them and put them through Calibre. I'm ignoring the copyright violation question because these are books I own and have in my house. This way I can carry them in a more convenient format.

I also was given a link to Pixel of Ink (http://www.PixelofInk.com) they have lots of free kindle books every day.

The best/worst thing to happen to my Kindle reading - someone let me play with her Kindle Fire for a little while. I bought one a few days later. I love the size and readability of the Kindle DX. But the Fire is pretty cool. Reading on it in daylight isn't too bad, and it covers most of my needs for a laptop. It's like a giant android phone. Sometimes it sucks because I expect to have internet all the time, lol, but the wifi is pretty good. I'll try and post something about my Fire and what I like/don't like about it soon.

Corrected book

We're writing about your past Kindle purchase of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. The version you received contained some errors that have been corrected.

Imagine my surprise when I got an email from Amazon about a book:
Subject: Kindle Title Brave New World (ASIN:B000FA5R5S) has an available update

An updated version of Brave New World (ASIN:B000FA5R5S) is now available. It’s important to note that when we send you the updated version, you will no longer be able to view any highlights, bookmarks, and notes made in your current version and your furthest reading location will be lost.

If you wish to receive the updated version, please reply to this email with the word “Yes” in the first line of your response. Within 2 hours of receiving the e-mail any device that has the title currently downloaded will be updated automatically if the wireless is on.

So for zero extra cost, I got me a corrected copy of a book! Let's see a paper book do that. And no, I have no idea what the correction to the book was.

"My Clippings" is killing me!

Ok, I love and hate the "My Clippings.txt" file the Kindle creates as I highlight text in a book.

I love it because it lets me highlight important things in a book and copy that into papers I write in school.  It even stores the comments I type with my highlights.

I hate it because it puts all the highlights from all my books in one file.
If I delete a book, the notes remain.
The notes are mixed together.  I read book A, then book B, and back to book A.  My notes are mixed together and I need to try and find all the notes from book A....

Amazon can fix this - put notes for each book in a different file.  Asking for Amazon to keep the notes sequential by the location number would be great, but I'll take what I can get!

Ok, I sent this idea off to Amazon, and they're saying they will forward it to the development team.  And while looking at Amazon's web site, I found a way around this!  Some of my other "suggestions" were put into the version 2.5 Kindle software, so I think they DO listen!

There is a web site "kindle.amazon.com" and when I sign in, I can see AND edit my notes.  When I sync my Kindle,  they show up on the Kindle too.  I can also display all the notes for a particular book.  It's not quite as cool as having it in the "My Clippings.txt" file, but it's better than what I spend a few hours organizing today!

Interesting comments at Best Buy - iPad

I was playing with an iPad at a Best Buy store this past weekend.  A customer was looking at another iPad.  He asked the employee about the availability of books for the iPad.  The Best Buy employee told the customer he could download a Kindle application for free and read all his Kindle books from Amazon on the iPad, and that books come from Amazon.

At no point did the employee talk about using the Apple book reader.  I couldn't even find the icon for the book reader on the iPad I was looking at, but the Kindle application for the iPad was there.  And the books looked good.

My only complaint about the iPad is the screen glare issue and I think the Kindle screen is easier on the eyes when spending significant periods of time reading.

Apple has some cool hardware, Amazon has the book reader application and book distribution.  Sounds like a good match to me.

If something happened to my Kindle DX, I'd replace it with an iPad.  But until then, I'm going to continue to enjoy my Kindle.

Buying spree!

I'm on a huge buying spree for Kindle books.  Most of them are the free books from Amazon.  But I've bought a few books for a few bucks each.

My biggest complaint about buying books?  If I request a sample of a book, then buy it, why does it download another book?  I still have the "sample" book too.  Buying a book should automatically remove the sample copy when the full copy downloads.

Most of the free books I'm buying are things I don't plan on reading - at least not for a while.  But this way I've got them handy for reference.  Here's a list of some of the recent free books:
The Age of Chivalry, Bulfinch
Age of Fable, Bulfinch
Beowulf
Bulfinch's Mythology, Bulfinch
Canterbury Tales, Chaucer
Dracula, Stoker
Modern Mythology, Lang
Notes to Shakespeare, Vol III Tragedies, Johnson

Some of these are things you are "supposed to read" as an English student, some of them are "classic" things that people keep talking about that I've never read before.

Games!

Yes, they now have GAMES for the Kindle!  I've downloaded a couple free ones.  I hope they come up with more games soon.

One game has a series of letters on the screen and you type in words you can make with those letters.  Letters vanish after they have been up for a while and new ones are added.  Imagine the Scrabble tiles, they appear on the right and slide left until they fall off.

Another game puts up a random selection of letters and you have to make words with them.  It is possible to make words that the game does not recognize in this game.  When you make enough words the game is over.  If you make a special word (very difficult, uses most of the letters) you can unlock the next level and advance.

These may be called "educational" games, but since I like reading and words, it's something fun that can fill a few minutes.  It might also make a fun special reward for a kid in a classroom setting.

I'd like to see a word search game and maybe even a crossword puzzle.

comments from others

Ok, most of my "books" are text books, PDF documents and other documents I create for the Kindle.  But I buy a few books from Amazon.  So while I was searching through the "free" books to buy from Amazon, I found Stephen King's UR for like $4.00.  I couldn't help it, I bought it.

I opened the book and began to read.  It's about an English professor who buys a kindle to prove something to his girlfriend.  Naturally, this Kindle is from a parallel universe or something.  So when I see something with a gray dotted line under it and 24 highlighters, I thought this was something Amazon and Stephen King did just to make his book spookier.  Nope, turns out that was something 24 other readers have highlighted!

I think it was cooler that King and Amazon were goofing with me.

By the way - it's a cool story.  I recommend it!

Yes, you can turn off the ability to see what others highlight, and the ability to have your highlights shared with others.

New software - follow up

Ok, I got the software update on my Kindle this summer.

I love the ability to group books into collections.  I do wish that if I put books (pdf, kindle format documents, etc) into folders that they would automatically be grouped into that collection.  But hey, it's a good start!  Thanks Amazon!

PDF viewing is better.  I can now pick several different sizes for the PDF image.  Yes, they still rotate when the Kindle is rotated.  This is a real step in the right direction! 

I've tried getting the iPad to view PDFs, but they're all hacked up PDF viewers, mostly designed for the iPhone.  The Apple store's comment to viewing PDFs is "just buy one (both the iPad and the PDF viewer) and try it!"  Adobe needs to provide a real PDF viewer for the iPad before that will even come close to meeting my needs.

Heck, Amazon provides Kindle for iPad so you can read your Kindle books on the iPad.  I've bought several Kindle format books and don't want to lose that investment.  Plus the Kindle is a much more readable screen (in my opinion) than the iPad.

selling my book?

My book is still listed as "pending" on Amazon's Kindle publishing web site.  They won't say why, but that it will usually be cleared up in a few days.

The best reason I've seen (ok, the only one) is that this title is already heavily listed on amazon.com.  But this is the only Kindle version of a public domain title.

oh well.

Selling my first book

I've converted lots of etext to Kindle format.  Between Project Gutenberg and Archive.org, I've found many of the literature books for my classes.  A few formatting codes later, I've got books for my Kindle for class.

One of my books from last semester, "As I Lay Dying" by Faulkner was quite a challenge, the paper version and the etext.  The prof. suggested we mark where each change of narrator happened and use that as "chapters" for discussion purposes.  So I made my Kindle book show each "chapter" and did a table of contents, etc.  And it's now for sale in the Kindle store for $1.00 - or it will be in 1 minute to 48 hours of Amazon processing.

There are a few formatting codes for Kindle books I can't figure out, but it works better than some of the Kindle books I've paid several dollars for.  I've heard that people can make more money off selling a book for $1 than the same book at a higher price.  So I'll see how much I make off this book.

I'm thinking of creating a book containing papers and creative writing I did for some classes and selling it too.  Most of it ran through "turn it in" so anyone trying to copy it will hit that wall.  Let's see how this experiment goes first.

Kindle software update

I got good news the other day - the software for the Kindle has been updated.  They also dropped the price of the Kindle DX to $350, and offer it in black.


Software updates to several things -

you can now create a "collection" of books.  One book can belong to multiple collections.  This is nice, I can now create a collection of books for each class.

PDF reading has been improved, it supports more magnifications, pan and scroll.

Comments can now be shared with facebook and twitter (who cares? I don't).

There are now more font sizes (and a new style) to make reading easier.

There are other little tweaks, but that's the big ones. 

One down-side?  When I highlight something and want to type a note, it's a much slower process before I can begin typing.  I have to hit a key, then wait for the window to pop up and the letter appear before I begin typing the full message.

Questions from a reader

This is a reply I send to someone asking me for my opinion on the 4 main ebook readers - Kindle, iPad, Nook and Sony e-reader.  I thought others might be curious, so here's my reply.

The Nook was not a real product when I bought my Kindle.  Reviews sound like I still made a good choice.  Barnes & Noble is big, but they have too many physical offices to stay competitive.  They're just jumping on a bandwagon, and I don't like to buy a first generation product.

The iPad has promise, but..... it wasn't announced until after I took delivery of my Kindle.  It didn't ship the first unit until a month later.  It requires iTunes to transfer data.  The Kindle I can attach to any computer with no special software (iTunes) or configuration issues.  I would not be able to attach the iPad to the school computers, basically.  Many of the "software" problems I saw on first use of the iPad have been fixed.  I'm expecting major changes to the way the iPad works this fall, and I bet it comes with new hardware.  Maybe I'll buy one then, but even if they get it perfect, I still may not buy one.

The Sony - it sounds good, the reviews were pretty good.  But.... I wanted the large screen of the Kindle DX.

I needed something RIGHT THEN that did ebooks, pdf documents.  The word processing and web surfing of the iPad would be nice, but, oh well.  

End of semester notes

I finished out the semester.  There are some things I really liked about the Kindle for classroom use.  For literature classes it's great.  (other than no page numbers).  For textbooks, it leaves something to be desired - especially since textbooks come as PDF documents.


I just finished a trip to the west coast and took my Kindle.  I was amazed how many people on the plane had Kindle readers.  One person had an iPad, but lots and lots of Kindles.

iPad

I spent 2 hours today playing with my friend's new iPad.  According to the delivery guy, the warehouse had dozens of pallets of them in the warehouse, ready to deliver.  And we live in B.F.E.....

So, it turns on and works.  The web browser is great.  email looks cool (Google has a special email client for it that's supposed to be incredible).  But he only had 1 or 2 books on his bookshelf when I got there.

When we started, we had to use iTunes to copy files to the iPad using the usb cable.  I thought it could sync over wifi, but we didn't get that far.
I copied over a .azw file, a .mobi file, a .html file and one pdf.
The .html file opened up in Safari, just like you'd expect.  The .azw and .mobi formats would do nothing.  Trying to open the pdf file was very difficult.


Using Calibre, we were able to "reconvert" the source file into an .epub file, which worked just fine on the iPad's bookshelf application.

We got the pdf to open up by pointing Safari at a web site's pdf file.  It opened up just great.  We installed an iPhone application to read pdfs, and it worked.... but!  because it's ported over, and written for a smaller screen the text wasn't great.  Turning the ipad and zooming in/out made it look good enough.

It's hard to figure out where to copy files to the ipad to open with "pages" and "numbers", or import documents.  Not saying that it won't work, but it was harder than I'd have liked to do this.

We put about 7 different books on the iPad, created with Calibre.  By using the "tag" setting in Metadata, I could group them into "genre" categories.  But there is no way to shrink a category to a small icon on the bookshelf.  So I'd still end up with 160 entries on my bookshelf.  It'd be possible to organize them, but not quite what I'd like.  It's possible to copy and paste notes into "pages" and type a note, but it won't do notes inside the book like the Kindle does.  (points to Kindle for this)

Turning the kindle on it's side, and propping it up on things, I got a nice angle and could touch type on the screen with high accuracy at about 25wpm, I wasn't trying to type fast.

First impression:  It's cool, and I'd like one.  BUT it's not quite there yet.  I bet software updates in the next month make it much better.

Adobe needs to release a free acrobat reader that is written to use the full features of the iPad.

No updates - new news coming soon

Between a family emergency and spring break I haven't been online in a while.  Updates coming soon.

cool link

I just found a cool link - EduKindle - Kindle information for/by educators.
http://www.edukindle.com/

Being able to carry around the NCLB documents could be handy.  I wonder what other wonderful stuff I'll find there.

my first paper

I've now written my first paper after reading on the Kindle.

My major textbooks come as PDF documents from the publisher.  These are typically anthologies, and we read selections of the book.  We all know how fun it is to read a PDF - at least I've got the big screen!  So I put the whole PDF document on the Kindle.  Then I'm covered for anything they throw at me in class.  But the things we are supposed to read.... Well, I can copy and past from the PDF, so I make documents I can convert to real Kindle format.  And I'm finally getting that down to a science.

So, I do most of my reading in the kindle format, of stuff I copy out of the PDF.  And that's where things get funky.  But here's what I've learned.  Leave the page number in when copying from PDF to Word (or whatever you make kindle documents from).

When I highlight something, if I plan to make a note, or just highlight it, I type the page number closest to it.  Why?  Because my profs expect me to be able to cite page numbers when I write my papers.

So on this paper, I had highlighted things in My Clippings that I used for my paper.  Sometimes I had a note too of what I found good about it.  But when I opened this clippings file to work on my paper, I had great quotes, but no page numbers.  Not a huge problem, just a bit of a time spent tracking info down.

In books where there aren't page numbers - like my Great Gatsby and Sun Also Rises, I think I'll have to put in chapter numbers and let it go at that.  I wonder how the MLA citation format will work for that?  It's an electronic source, but it's not.... Hmmm. Something to think about.

in class use

I'm getting better at reading the Kindle in class.  The instructor will start reading a phrase and I'll be ready with "search".  It takes me a minute or so longer, but I get there.  Sometimes if they're flipping through the book too much, I'll just jot down the phrase he starts with and then just listen intently.

Today in class, a topic came up.  I put in the search and poof! I found the perfect reference to bring up in class.  The instructor thought it was good, so he asked "what page are you on?" and I went, um, Location 1704.

Wouldn't it be cool if the little line at the bottom had a symbol to show the chapter breaks?  Then you could go: "I'm near the end of chapter 10". 

And that's close to my other "complaint".  When I've got a paper book, sometimes I like to see how close I am to the end of a chapter, or a good stopping place.  It's hard to do that on the Kindle.  I'm more likely to stop wherever.  Even if another 100 words would get to the end of the chapter.  Oh well.  There are worse things.

My Clippings

I've said this before, but it'd be nice if all the clippings for each book were in different files.

It'd be nice if when deleting a book, it asked if you wanted to delete the clippings for that book.

You can open "my clippings" on the Kindle and highlight something in the clippings.  Does this seem redundant/circular?

If I go into a book and delete the comment I wrote with a highlighting, the highlighting remains.  if I delete the highlighting first, the note remains.  Shouldn't one delete the other?