A conflagration of kindles
Mar. 13th, 2009 05:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsittingstill Um. So, you'll recall way back when, when the Kindle 2 came out, and I looked it over and was disappointed that it didn't have an SD card slot or a user-replaceable battery, and that it was going to charge from USB and so on...
Well, I read a site called MobileRead which is about e-books and e-book readers. They have different sections for people who use different readers and formats and so on, and I mostly read the Kindle pages. But one day I went to the site and there was a Kindle 2 giveaway/raffle announced on the front page. Just post to such-and-such thread saying you wanted to join, and then make a few posts on the Kindle portion of the site, which I often do anyway.
(Blink) Well. What the hell, I wouldn't turn down a Kindle 2, and it costs nothing to sign up, and anybody can get lucky.
My reading and posting over at MobileRead did go up for the two weeks or so that the contest ran. And on the day the contest was done (or maybe the following day) when I logged on to the MobileRead boards I had a personal message from a name I recognized as someone who posted a lot and was well-thought-of over there. I admit that "maybe I won the contest" flicked briefly through my mind as I went to my user control panel to read the personal message, but I dismissed it as unlikely.
Except that I had won the contest.
And I am now the happy possessor of a Kindle 1 and a Kindle 2.
It was supposed to come Monday, but when I checked the delivery tracking system this morning it was in Jefferson City as of 7:35 am. So I spent much of the morning glancing thoughtfully out at the mailbox. I still managed to miss the mail carrier, though. About noon I went outside to check the mailbox just in case and found an Amazon box there. So yard work was unavoidably postponed while I unwrapped it and plugged it in and began playing with it.
Some first impressions:
Okay, I had thought I would be mature and deep enough to be entirely unmoved by its greater sleekness. I was wrong; I now officially eat crow on this one. Deep down in my immature heart of hearts I *do* like its design better (hangs head.)
Also the stubby little joystick they call a "five-way-switch" is in fact noticeably more convenient than the K1 roller. But it's not as fast if you have to go a long way to the word or link you want.
The text is just a smidge lighter. The "white" of the screen is just a smidge lighter too. Some folks have reported readablity problems as a result.
The charging-from-usb thing is not as bad as I thought. It comes with a usb cord (micro usb on one end, standard (male) usb on the other, that plugs right into a two-prong-plug-to-USB-female adapter; the whole usb-twoprong plug arrangement is about the size of a normal two prong plug. It's quite clever. The down side is you can't charge it and transfer reading material to it simultaneously--except I suppose the computer may be charging it, in a half-hearted kind of way, as you're transferring stuff.
I plugged it in when I got it and it took about 3 hours to charge; much less time than I thought.
I still wish it had folders.
Sleep/wake seems much faster, but I don't have much stuff on it yet.
I registered it to my account first thing; I can only have my periodicals on one Kindle at a time. Also my Kindle e-mail address only works for one Kindle, but my other Kindle has its own e-mail address.
It didn't come with its own cover, the way the Kindle 1 did (some people hated the Kindle 1 cover but I had very little problem with it and leave it in the cover pretty much full time). The standard Kindle 2 cover seems to have pretty good reviews, so when I could bring myself to believe that the Kindle 2 was in fact seriously real and on its way, I ordered one. However it won't be here for a couple of days yet. I'm a little afraid to take the Kindle 2 out of the house without one; those e-ink screens can be broken.
One apparent downside; I can transfer my subscriptions and such to the Kindle 2 but of my 10 or so Analogs I can only move the latest 3 over. I will probably call customer service to see if anything can be done about this.
Kip and I had agreed that I would try out the K1 and the K2 and see which one I like better, and he'll get the other one. I'm thinking I may want the K2, but I'm not eager to leave my old Analogs behind.
I tried out the text to speech and it's pretty good for a computer voice. With all that means--it's really pretty good, but nobody is going to forget that they're listening to a computer voice. I don't know how much I'll really use it, but it's neat to have the capability. I have not yet checked how many of my books allow it to be used, but it works fine on the Kindle's User Manual.
Well, I read a site called MobileRead which is about e-books and e-book readers. They have different sections for people who use different readers and formats and so on, and I mostly read the Kindle pages. But one day I went to the site and there was a Kindle 2 giveaway/raffle announced on the front page. Just post to such-and-such thread saying you wanted to join, and then make a few posts on the Kindle portion of the site, which I often do anyway.
(Blink) Well. What the hell, I wouldn't turn down a Kindle 2, and it costs nothing to sign up, and anybody can get lucky.
My reading and posting over at MobileRead did go up for the two weeks or so that the contest ran. And on the day the contest was done (or maybe the following day) when I logged on to the MobileRead boards I had a personal message from a name I recognized as someone who posted a lot and was well-thought-of over there. I admit that "maybe I won the contest" flicked briefly through my mind as I went to my user control panel to read the personal message, but I dismissed it as unlikely.
Except that I had won the contest.
And I am now the happy possessor of a Kindle 1 and a Kindle 2.
It was supposed to come Monday, but when I checked the delivery tracking system this morning it was in Jefferson City as of 7:35 am. So I spent much of the morning glancing thoughtfully out at the mailbox. I still managed to miss the mail carrier, though. About noon I went outside to check the mailbox just in case and found an Amazon box there. So yard work was unavoidably postponed while I unwrapped it and plugged it in and began playing with it.
Some first impressions:
Okay, I had thought I would be mature and deep enough to be entirely unmoved by its greater sleekness. I was wrong; I now officially eat crow on this one. Deep down in my immature heart of hearts I *do* like its design better (hangs head.)
Also the stubby little joystick they call a "five-way-switch" is in fact noticeably more convenient than the K1 roller. But it's not as fast if you have to go a long way to the word or link you want.
The text is just a smidge lighter. The "white" of the screen is just a smidge lighter too. Some folks have reported readablity problems as a result.
The charging-from-usb thing is not as bad as I thought. It comes with a usb cord (micro usb on one end, standard (male) usb on the other, that plugs right into a two-prong-plug-to-USB-female adapter; the whole usb-twoprong plug arrangement is about the size of a normal two prong plug. It's quite clever. The down side is you can't charge it and transfer reading material to it simultaneously--except I suppose the computer may be charging it, in a half-hearted kind of way, as you're transferring stuff.
I plugged it in when I got it and it took about 3 hours to charge; much less time than I thought.
I still wish it had folders.
Sleep/wake seems much faster, but I don't have much stuff on it yet.
I registered it to my account first thing; I can only have my periodicals on one Kindle at a time. Also my Kindle e-mail address only works for one Kindle, but my other Kindle has its own e-mail address.
It didn't come with its own cover, the way the Kindle 1 did (some people hated the Kindle 1 cover but I had very little problem with it and leave it in the cover pretty much full time). The standard Kindle 2 cover seems to have pretty good reviews, so when I could bring myself to believe that the Kindle 2 was in fact seriously real and on its way, I ordered one. However it won't be here for a couple of days yet. I'm a little afraid to take the Kindle 2 out of the house without one; those e-ink screens can be broken.
One apparent downside; I can transfer my subscriptions and such to the Kindle 2 but of my 10 or so Analogs I can only move the latest 3 over. I will probably call customer service to see if anything can be done about this.
Kip and I had agreed that I would try out the K1 and the K2 and see which one I like better, and he'll get the other one. I'm thinking I may want the K2, but I'm not eager to leave my old Analogs behind.
I tried out the text to speech and it's pretty good for a computer voice. With all that means--it's really pretty good, but nobody is going to forget that they're listening to a computer voice. I don't know how much I'll really use it, but it's neat to have the capability. I have not yet checked how many of my books allow it to be used, but it works fine on the Kindle's User Manual.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-13 11:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-14 12:17 am (UTC)I really like the device, and I hope Amazon comes to its senses, but you might want to hold off on buying for a while until we see how things are going to shake out.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-14 04:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-13 11:28 pm (UTC)http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/13/amazon_kindle_dmca/
no subject
Date: 2009-03-14 12:19 am (UTC)This leaves me feeling a bit ambiguous. On the one hand I like the device, on the other hand I'm not happy about how Amazon has been behaving.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-13 11:37 pm (UTC)Glad you're enjoying yours, though! Congratulations!
no subject
Date: 2009-03-14 12:20 am (UTC)But I totally support your right to go the paper route; I like paper books too. :-)
no subject
Date: 2009-03-14 12:24 am (UTC)I'm liking it a lot so far; the only things keeping me from buying one for myself are the fact that I need a Linux phone first, and the fact that I've seen far better readers (though so far they're still highly experimental).
no subject
Date: 2009-03-14 01:29 am (UTC)Um. Sorry. Concentrate, yes.
I really like the device itself. I'm not so happy with Amazon's recent decision to target a DCMA takedown at MobileRead, the very site that hosted the giveaway where I won my Kindle 2 :-7
I think Colleen will like it, however; the web browsing is slow (and she may have to try a few times to get it to work; at first the menu kept disappearing, but eventually it settled down) but the K2's handling of pictures is much better than the K1s (16 grays beats 4 grays all hollow), and the joystick is easier to use than the old roller and means processes take fewer steps.
Let me point you at a couple of things that may help keep the costs down (always a factor for me). If she is interested in public domain e-books, MobileRead has a document that displays on Kindle that has links to their (10,000!) public domain e-books so they download over whispernet. The latest version can be downloaded at http://www.mobileread.com/mobiguide Which reminds me, just a sec... Okay I have tested it on the Kindle 2 and it works. Basically you have to set it up by downloading the mobiguide to a computer and loading it into the "documents" folder on the Kindle via USB, but after that you just open it up on the Kindle like any other document, and click on the links to documents you want to download.
Also there is Feedbooks, which has a lot of public domain e-books and a document to download them over whispernet: just a sec... www.feedbooks.com/kindleguide and I just tested that on the Kindle 2 and it works too.
Baen books has a lot of books in their "Baen Free Library" if she likes science fiction. Unfortunately you'll have to download those on a computer and move them to the Kindle by USB, I think. They also have purchaseable e-books that run 4, 5 and 6 dollars (though the prices are higher for books that are still in hardback of course).
For that matter, Amazon has a lot of free books for Kindle; you can cruise the store and sort the price from low to high; it'll start with books whose price is $0.00 :-)
no subject
Date: 2009-03-14 02:22 am (UTC)Is there any way to get a Kindle to log in on LJ?
As for the experimental readers, um... We've built a few in our lab, based on the display in eInk's latest dev kit and a custom CPU running Debian. Right now they're only one size bigger than the Kindle: about a 10" screen. The battery life is, as you might expect from an experimental device, lousy. PDF works pretty well if you lay it out for the actual screen size, which of course most places don't.
I can use one only because I'm developing part of the software for it. Keep it? Not if it's needed for a demo.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-14 02:58 am (UTC)Hmm. I think LJ is bent out of shape that I'm logged in on two devices. Just another sec.
kindle test
Date: 2009-03-14 03:02 am (UTC)Re: kindle test
Date: 2009-03-14 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-14 03:26 am (UTC)A 10 inch screen is significantly bigger than a 6 inch screen, which is what a Kindle is. PDF would be readable if the margins were chopped off. There are some people (dedicated types) who lay out pdfs for smaller screens, but I agree; most of them are for A4 or thereabouts.
There is word of a newspaper company that is producing a reader with a 14 inch screen, which is about A4. Haven't seen anything real yet, though.
Anyway; sorry I couldn't figure the Kindle log-in problem out.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 04:01 pm (UTC)Changing the extension to .mbp doesn't seem to work, either.
OK. Changed the extension back to .mobi and now it works. Weird. But that's cool.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-20 07:54 pm (UTC)Things I've discovered: 1) not all azw files are DRMed; my Analogs transferred over just fine once I got out the USB cords and moved them from Kindle to Kindle.
2) it's possible to move the .mbp? files from Kindle to Kindle; I did this when I moved my (Gutenberg project) copy of Origin of Species to my new Kindle--I was *not* looking forward to having to re-do my highlights and annotations, since I was 3/4 of the way through and it's a big book.
Kindle2 text-to-speech
Date: 2009-03-14 03:50 pm (UTC)Re: Kindle2 text-to-speech
Date: 2009-03-14 05:20 pm (UTC)Re: Kindle2 text-to-speech
Date: 2009-03-16 01:58 pm (UTC)So, what did you think of it when you heard it? Is it good enough to be useful to the blind? I think the Kindle itself would only be useable if the blind person had a sighted assistant to navigate the menus to get the blind person started on the book in any case, because the text-to-speech function doesn't work with the menus and controls. But I'd be interested to know more of your thoughts on this.
Re: Kindle2 text-to-speech
Date: 2009-03-16 01:56 pm (UTC)