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?

screen protector

I got my new (second) screen protector in the mail today.  I had one hair under the first one.  Trying to fix that I got about 90 million specs of dirt under it.... I used to put screen protectors on a 5x7 display, and even a few times on a 9x10 display.  But this one is hard to do!

The rubber-ish slip cover I bought is nice, but it seems to attract cat hair like a magnet.  But it lets me grip it comfortably and with less fear of it sliding out of my hand.

With luck, I'll get the screen protector on and little or no dirt (wishful thinking!) on Friday.

Kindle audio reading

On Monday I was in the car.  I hooked the speaker jack to the car (I have a cable and connector for this on the car stereo).  I then opened a book and told it to start reading.

It would be nice if it was possible to "rewind" the reading just a bit.  I can't see a way to do that.

Pause takes several button presses to pause/resume playback.
The volume up and down should display a number so I have an idea how loud the volume is set.

When playing the book as an audio book (I didn't do this while driving) you can't highlight text and make notes.  You can't even do it when audio is paused.  You have to STOP the audio to make a note.

I do like the way the page keeps the currently read text on screen.  it's like having a book read along.  With just an audio book, especially a text book, I fade out and let it drone on.  By following along, I get a better reading/audio book experience.

Personally, I like the "slowest" audio speed and "female" voice.

But reading things with footnotes is funny, for some reason it reads them as the number and the word feet.  "and then 4 the this and that" reads as "and then, four feet, the this and that".  Funny, once I get used to it, it's just a little odd.

rebooted while reading - 2/16/2010

I was reading at lunch today.  The book just got funny about moving the cursor or switching pages.  Then "poof" it rebooted.  I put it down and a few minutes later it was back, but with zero books.  Another minute or two and all my books had returned. 

This is the second time I've had it reboot.  Distressing, but not fatal.

Bookmarks

Ok, "Bookmarks" are confusing.  When I open a book, it goes back to where I was before.  That's nice if I'm reading for fun.

But if I'm reading for a class, when I go to class and move the "focus" (or current page, or whatever) and exit, it saves that.  Then when I go back to finish reading, I forget where I was.  It should ask me if I want to save the location where I exit.
Currently, when I'm reading a long book for class, before class I open the book and make a "bookmark" with 'finished reading here' so I can find my place again.

I also wish I could create two "thumbprints", so I could create a mark on page 9 and page 90 and flip back and forth quickly in class.  Neither of these would replace my "last page read" mark (that I just commented about).

Sometimes I get lost in class, the instructor will flip back a page or two real casually.  This isn't something that is gonna happen to ma and pa kettle.  But in a classroom....  It's worse if the "book" is a PDF because it takes so long to switch pages.

tags, text and clipping/notes

I wish the Kindle documents supported "fancy" quotes - the typographer's single and double quotes that curve.  Or at least if they were in the document, would just display something normal.  Don't get me started on three different dashes - regular, em-dash and I can't tell what kind of dash.  And only one displays normally.....
I wish the bold and italic tags worked.  I've found the BR tag more handy than the p and /p combinations.

I've discovered if I save my files as .html and open them in my web browser, I can see where these wacky characters are before I upload/convert them to the Kindle. 

I wish the clippings files were specific - one per book.  That way I could delete all the clippings for one "book" when I remove that book.  I see this file growing out of control over time.  Especially this first semester.

oh, that's how that works....

Ok, I figured out how to go from looking at my notes/clippings and going to that spot in the full book.  Duh, it was an ID 10 T error....

Now if only it was easier to get some of my textbook/handout stuff formatted as Kindle friendly documents.  Oh well, it's getting far enough into the semester, I've got most of my stuff on the Kindle.

I still wish it was possible to organize the 10 documents from Victorian Literature on one "bookshelf" and American Modern on another "bookshelf" so they are easier to keep grouped together.

I even read it bed with it last night, it wasn't bad.  I'm getting used to reading it, and starting to like it.

maybe I'm doing it wrong?

If I look at my notes, I can see text in a book that I've highlighted.  And any notes I may have made with the highlighting.  But I have the same problem as when I use the "search this book" tool.

I can't go from the search results directly to that location in the text.  Sure, I get the 3-4 lines around the search words.  But how do I go to the full book at this spot?  It's either not possible, or it's confusing.

Ok, who decided to put the connector on the "bottom" of the unit?  If I'm working with it while it's plugged in, this is right where I like to hold it.  How about next to the volume buttons or something?  I did go buy an extra cable (at Staples) so I can leave one at home and one at school.

The lack of an organizational system is getting annoying.  I'm up to 98 personal documents, plus one item that only shows up when I switch to books.  (Plus 14 "free" books I've downloaded).  I want a hierarchial list of "documents" or books or whatever so I can group things by the class they go with.

I've started naming all documents for "American Modern Writers" with AM and all the "Victorian Literature" with VL.  But if I rename the file on the Kindle, it doesn't change the way it shows in the list.  I have to resend it to the Kindle email address to convert it after I change the file name on my computer.  A bit of a pain.  Oh, and this makes any notes I've written no longer "live" in the document.  They are kept in My Clippings.txt but aren't available when I open the book.

At least it hasn't locked up.

Could you hold that thought? I've got to reboot my book....

Yeah, it was nuts!  I was in a PDF format book in class.  I tried to change orientation to wide, nothing.  Went back to tall, nothing changed.  Couldn't change pages.  None of the buttons seemed to do anything.
The professor kept talking.
I tried to use the power button to go to sleep mode.  Nothing.
The professor kept talking, class went on.
I held the power button to power it off, didn't seem to do anything. (hold power button for more than 5 seconds to turn off).  No response.  Repeated for longer, and it turned off.
And the professor kept on going.
Ok, now it wasn't turning on......
The class kept going, looking at different pages of the poem....

I held the power button in the "on" position and it turned on.  The screen that appeared was the kid under the tree with the Amazon logo, I saw this once when I took it out of the box.  It went to the normal screen and said I had zero books.  I switched to documents, no documents.  Ok, well, at least I can reload them from my Mac later.  Then it did a screen refresh and my files all came back.

Total time I was distracted and F'd in class?  5 to 8 minutes.

Buying a book, "read to me", and reading on a bus

I was reading something (yes, on the Kindle) and it referened Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  So I hit the Kindle store and they had it for $0.00 - yep! Free.  Below it they listed several other free things I might be interested in.  So I had to "buy" Heart of Darkness".  But then it wouldn't take me back to the previous page to look at the other suggestions.  I had to search for "Heart of Darkness" again to find the other books it recommended.
Not very friendly.  But it did work.

Pressing the "Menu" button should bring up the dictionary.  Doesn't matter if I'm in a "book" or a PDF file.  Let me pull the dictionary up any time.

I also figured out how to turn on the "read to me" feature.  Better yet, I found the controls to slow it down and switch the voice.  It took me a while to figure out how to adjust the volume.  (physical buttons on the side of the unit, how could I miss that?) I was trying to do it with the control stick/mouse thing.  So I read along while the Kindle read out loud on a bus trip.

A comment about that - if you are going to read in a moving vehicle, make sure it's an ebook and not a pdf.  Then you can make the text nice and big to compensate for the jiggling of the bus.  On the way back, I turned on the tiny little light above my seat and I could read the screen.  Amazingly well, actually.  But I didn't actually read, I was too tired.

getting more familiar with Kindle

It feels like I'm spending lots of time getting content into the Kindle.  Hopefully this is only at the start of the semester and won't continue all semester long!  If it does continue, it's going to be more of a time drain than I really want!

For example - one professor gave us a stack of 30 or so double sided pages that we are going to use as extra readings this semester.  I threw them in my scanner and made them into .jpg files.  Some of the pages were a book thrown into a coppier and this was generation X of the photocopy.  Some were printed from the web and some were typed by the prof and printed. 

The typed and recent web-printed documents did OCR pretty well and became Kindle documents.

The book pages were cleaned up a bit - delete large black spots, change rotation and put into pdf format.

Converting a document to Kindle format isn't hard, but there are lots of small OCR generated typos that the OCD in me wants to fix, each and every one.  I'm trying to limit fixes to major formatting issues and things that change or confuse the ability to read the document. The time spent reviewing the document gives me a preview of what's in it as I skim for formatting and major word damage by the OCR tool.  It reads better on the Kindle, the notation and dictionary work great with these.

The PDF document is fast to create, even if I do edit the image slightly to remove unsightly blemishes.  But handwritten notes on the page, or things circled/highlighted before it was copied make me crazy.  They're fast to make, but slow to read.  No enlargement of the text is also a down side to the pdf format.

In the end, short term usability (2-3 class periods over the semester) means I shouldn't waste too much time on them.

It still gets attention from classmates when I pull it out.  I try to encourage them to ask questions about it, but after class, it's a tool, not a topic for classroom discussion.  Yes, professors ask too.  It's funny how many think it's the Apple iPad, just because it's big.  They think Kindle=small.  They're all amazed at the screen though.

Buying the first book

Ok, so I'm slow.....

One textbook has a publisher supplied Kindle version.  I was just about to order it.  Then I noticed a "sample" button.  So I clicked that.  Turned on the wireless (I keep it off to save power, plus I haven't needed it till now) and there's the Forward, Introduction, Chapter 1 and the first page of Chapter 2.  I can't make notes because it's a sample.  But it's a first step to buying a Kindle only book.

Just for fun, I put in "free Kindle book" into amazon and wham!  The list of books that is $0.00 or $0.01 is pretty good.  Sure, some of them I could do myself (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) but they do it for me, and for free.  So I "bought" about 6 of these free books.  This will give me something to distract me from reading textbooks.  And it'll let me play with some of the official Kindle books.  I want to check out the text to speech feature.

Hardware/user interface comments

Here's an email I sent to Amazon's Kindle feedback team:

The mouse stick is difficult to use. IBM came up with a mouse-stick for their laptops that works, blackberry has a "ball" on their phone, both work better than your directional stick.

When creating a note, sometimes the note box appears right over the text I've highlighted, so I can't see what I'm trying to write a note about.

I'm trying this to edit a "manuscript" from a friend. It'd be nice if my note file included all the text I highlighted. This way, I could just email him this clipping/note file and he'd have his text and my suggestions/comments. I understand copyright issues, so put a limit on how many words can be done this way at a time.

PDF documents are VERY slow. Need to have a ZOOM feature other than rotating unit.

Some documents (PDF and kindle books) I want to scroll down just a little bit cause the text I'm reading is at the edge of the display.

Give me a set of REAL number keys. Alt-number alt-number alt-number stinks.

I put 60 documents on here in 3 days (lots of pdfs and word files I emailed to the Kindle). Give me the ability to create folders in the kindle-documents folder so I can have my list of books grouped. Right now the home button shows me all of them. Let it show me all the items in "documents" and the names of "folders" in documents.

i.e.

book 1

book 2

Shakespeare folder

Macbeth

Hamlet

Romeo & Juliet

Stephen King

The Stand

The Shinning

etc

documents to read for work

memo 1 (emailed to kindle)

memo 2 (emailed to kindle)

Yeah, I got a generic "thanks" email. Maybe they read this, maybe they don't. I'll publish more hardware/user interface comments from time to time.

My Kindle at College - background

I'm probably setting a record, and from what I can find on the net, doing something new. I bought a Kindle and got it on Wednesday January 27th (2010) and have yet to buy a kindle book for it! A suggestion from someone at school got me started with writing this blog and I swore I'd never have a blog. But here goes!

As a student with a disability, I try to limit the weight of items in my backpack. I discovered the hard way that if you have too many books in your backpack, it can A) hurt your back. B) cause your wheelchair to flip. C) gets annoying. With some help from my trusty scanner, and some of the textbook publishers, I'm trying something different.

I have bought some books, cut out each page and scanned them into my computer. I then make a PDF document and carry around just the pages I need. I have the "whole" book as a PDF document on my thumb drive and on my computer at home. This worked well until a professor gave the wrong page, wanted to skip around in the book mid-class, etc.

Some publishers have provided a PDF to the school for my use. I must buy a copy of the book as part of the licensing. But it gives me a high quality PDF document and takes zero time on my part. I again print parts of the book and have the full book at home as well as my thumb drive.

Some of my books are "literature" and I can find them at Project Gutenberg or The Archive and I can download them from there. The downfall to this is when the professor says "turn to page....." and I go "ummm". But it's searchable on my computer when I write papers and need to find a quote. And these I can print in an easy to read font/size.

I've even found many literature books as free audio books. My classmates are envious, but I share with them. (free online resources cost a dozen cookies or some brownies).

When a professor kills a tree printing multiple handouts, I end up scanning these into PDF documents so I can do my research and reading anywhere without carrying them around.

This semester looked to be the first semester where all my books are PDF documents or word documents. I had to scan two books by hand, the rest were free literature or PDF documents from the publishers. But how to carry and read them easily?

I took the plunge and ordered the Kindle (the DX - big screen model). It got LOTS of attention in class on Friday! And I'm still trying to get used to it.

I've figured out how to take "word" documents and format them for pages, table of contents and put them on the Kindle. Copying the PDF documents over was a snap. There is only one text book not yet on my Kindle. I bought the paper copy, and it has a Kindle format at Amazon. So I'll probably buy that soon. I don't actually need to read it just yet for class.

I'm not sure this is an idea or option that every student will use, will want to use. But maybe posting my ideas and experiences will help someone else decide if they want to go this route. I found articles about Kindles in education (article 1) (article 2). So maybe they're not ready for it campus wide, but what about you as an individual? (disability optional!)

If we pressure textbook publishers, electronic textbooks may become reasonably priced and easily transportable.