Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

right

so i have the 3g model, downloading from the magic catalog above should be free right?

i'm nervous about incurring some crazy charges before i know what i'm doing here.

all free iirc

sweet.

Aside from actual non-free book purchases, is there anything else i'm likely to be charged for then?

First impressions are great

If you use send-to-kindle and don't use your @free.kindle.com address, you will be charged ($0.10/MB, I think) for documents that you send to your device.

not anything i'm likely to do by accident so. Cheers.

Yeah, should be fine. There was a built-in surcharge for buying books in some countries but I think that's gone now.

I end up reserving it for things I need to read but won't need to cite or take notes from. General background reading. When I need to really use a book, I need to be able to shove three fingers in there, keep my spot at different parts of the book, flip back and forth, keep one book open while I grab another one so I can compare what Smith and Jones said about Johnson, fill it with bookmarks - even being able to tell at a glance how many pages I've bookmarked in a stack of books is something I depend on.

interesting, i'm the opposite, i totally use it for books to take notes from, especially on the iPad. Can leave bookmarks with a tap, see them all at a glace on the bottom bar, search and best of all is not having to type the quotes, you just highlight and they sync.

Before I got a Kindle I was all "why would people want to annotate/mark text with an ebook reader", but since I got the thing I've been doing it almost daily.

Re the ipad (I know this is off topic): I've been toying with a few note-taking apps, and being able to annotate/draw on a PDF is a revelation.

I used to fold the bottom corner of pages I wanted to make notes from, and then never do it due to idleness. no more!

I don't use an iPad, though, I use the Kindle (and I tend to use it in landscape orientation, so the keyboard's not as handy - that's a minor point though, because if I used the keyboard more, I'd reorient the display). I don't know, everyone reads/note-takes differently - I'm used to making multiple passes through books, skimming quickly the first time to see which parts I need to read, folding down or otherwise marking pages, etc etc. Some of it is stuff I could re-learn, although the "compare two or more books at once" business is clumsy with anything but actual books.

I'm also okay with it not replacing books for me. mp3s didn't replace CDs for me. It's not a perfect analogy - I can create mp3s from CDs and vice versa, so they don't have to compete for my money - but still.

Yeah, I think some people are a bit weird about ebooks being a lifetime commitment, like from that moment forth you can't just pick up a book and read it.

This is cool:

http://kindleworld.blogspot.com/2011/04/11-000-local-libraries-in-kindle.html

yeah this is a big deal, overdrive compatibility had been one of the selling points for the other e-readers but not anymore

Hi. Can anyone recommend an epub->mobi converter that isn't Calibre? Thanks.

(Accidentally asked this on rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread, oops)

Sadly no. I've looked and I don't think there is one.

i found an online converter, rather than one you can d/l and use, but it worked perfectly, i'll try to find and post the address tomorrow

after a year of whining about being jealous of my wife's kindle, she and my parents got me one for my bday. pumped.

anyone have thoughts on cases? any of you using a non-amazon case?

i got a non amazon soft leather/plether folding case for about ten quid, no light but perfect besides

the amazon one is so expensive for what it is

You reckon? It's leather and it's got a light in it. It could be cheaper but it feels very well made.

I bought one with mine and can't live without that light

amazon doesn't even appear to be selling the nonlighted covers anymore. when did that happen?

battery needs recharging after c. 3 weeks of constant use

This thing is brilliant.

Kindle is really convenient but a totally dull reading experience. Grey. Dull.

as opposed to what? i don't necessarily disagree but i'm not exactly sure what you mean.

i usually only read books on plain paper with black type so in that respect it's not made any difference, maybe red ink is a thing for other ppl i dunno

cheapskate's kindle case I saw recommended online was a bubblewrap mailer.

My battery life is really variable. Sometimes I get several weeks of actually using it, sometimes I'll charge it and then not get round to using it for a week and it'll be dead. Is anyone else's like that?

The jackets that you can still read it in are a nice idea but all the ones I've seen are expensive, even without a light. So I just got it a little neoprene suit so it doesn't gather so much dust when I'm not using it.

I was surprised when I got it at just how readable it was, but I've got to admit that if I have a choice between an unread paper book and an unread Kindle ebook (and I have very many of both right now) I'm probably still going to go for the hard copy.

agree with every word of that last sentence

http://i.friendfeed.com/dc2cd905013dea7fcd12071d9a00ecea9ecf1bcc

this info's probably on here somewhere already but here's how to install your own screensavers

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/37424/jailbreak-your-kindle-for-dead-simple-screensaver-customization/

My sony reader screen has gone all messed up and wrong :( I'll have to take it back to Argos and sort it out, I hope they don't get funny about it.

not sure if this has been mentioned on here, but is anyone else annoyed as fuck by the pdf highlight problem? as in, you click to highlight a passage in a pdf and it actually highlights a different set of words, further down the page. anyone know if this has been fixed in an update?

ps. thanks v much for that link n/a

new Nook looks pretty awesome. Might get me into the ebook thing.

I wonder where you download pirated ebooks

google.com

also i fucking love this thing--

just did a bit of travel and managed to read two books of the game of thrones series (or w/e its called), which would've amounted to like 1500+ pages of book that i didn't have to carry

yeah that's one reason i read those on this.

also tbh the fact that i can adjust the font/size is awesome.

what kind of a file is it you use with a kindle? also , why the hell don't they just all use .txt I shall nev3r knlw

irritated that they make you turn them "off" for take-off and landing, though. i get that they're electronic devices, but given that they only use electricity to turn the page, and very little at that, it seems insane that they could disrupt the plane's equipment. kinda want to petition the FAA or whoever to give them a pass or something

it's some made-up proprietary format called AZW but they can read txt too, although not always as well as you like. amazon has a pretty neat automatic everything-->AZW converter you can email files to and they go to your kindle, although you have to dig through their help page to reassure yourself you're doing it the way that doesn't incur charges.

and the "browser" - is it a wowser or a dirty trouser?

reading wikipedia on it is an experience so clunky and impossible it's meditative

you can read .txt on the ipod nano but just to be dicks apple limits the length of it - granted reading an ebook on it would be weird but at least if you were bored somewhere you could do it. I mean, I can store a 1gb movie file on there so I knwo technically it could be done!

If you're that determined to read books on a 3 cm screen surely you have the determination to slap a Linux on the thing.

Recently there's been talk of Amazon adding epub support.

i have a ton of articles saved on my instapaper account, about 300 or so. i don't like the way instapaper turns them into a sort of magazine with an article limit of 20. it's annoying to have to go through the contents page each time to find the one i want. i'd rather just have each article as an individual 'ebook' or mobi file on my kindle, so i can organise by category (music articles, guardian articles, etc).

my current solution is to keep using instapaper to save any articles i want to read, but then load the original page and use rekindleit http://www.rekindle.it/ to send the article direct to my kindle. i'll do this for each article, then take all 300 articles off my kindle, stick them in calibre, reconvert them so get rid of all the 0z0w084djk93932 garbled junk on the filename, tag the author as 111111, stick them back on my kindle and use the collection function to stick them in the relevant folders on my kindle (the 111 author thing means i can sort them and stick them all in quicker than adding each at a time).

obviously, this is a pretty time-consuming and inefficient process to get where i want. does anyone have a better solution? are there any better tools for this than rekindleit? annoyingly, the rekindleit site is down right now so i can't even do it my original way!

I use klip.me, it makes each article its own book, don't know how well it'll work for scholarly stuff.